Forget the safety pins. Never mind the mohawks. One of the biggest acts of rebellion that Stephen Jones ever undertook was to make a hat. Anarchy was almost expected, part of the punk package of the 1970s and early ’80s clubland whirlwind in which a young Jones circulated at the time, a creative confluence where fashion, art and club culture collided

But for a Central Saint Martins’ student and cohort of Leigh Bowery, Steve Strange, Malcolm McLaren and Boy George to want to make hats – those bourgeois confections favoured by the Queen Mother and Home Counties ladies in their Sunday best – now that was renegade.

“Can you imagine it?” says Jones, who is talking to 10 from within the inner sanctum of his Covent Garden curiosity shop, picking his way past lacquered leaf fronds destined for a beret and shards of acetate headed for a visor. “It was 1976, there we were right at the beginning of punk, and I was going into hat-making. How nuts was that? Actually, it was the most punk thing I’d ever done,” he says of the design decision to hone in on what was perceived as the most affected and antiquated accessory of them all, at least to his horrified course tutors at CSM. “They tried to fail me. They hated that I wanted to study the art of hat-making. But I was conscious of the fact that me going into hats was way more rebellious and unexpected than sporting a mohawk and wearing ripped jeans and black nail polish.” His fellow students might have been taking to the streets in Siouxsie Sioux-inspired eyeliner and studded leather jackets, but Jones would subvert the culture in his singular way. “Call it my own form of protest,” says the softly spoken Jones, 66, as one of his wry, sideways smiles breaks out.

It’s been 44 years since the milliner founded his company, with backing from the late pop star Steve Strange, and 2024 is set to be a big one for Jones. He has just announced a major retrospective exhibition opening in October at the Palais Galliera in Paris, charting his journey from Merseyside to London to becoming the darling of the city’s fashion houses. “It’s about my love affair with Paris in particular,” he says. “And my work with the houses of that city, but also the road that led me to this point.”

It’s a long way from the Wirral, where Jones grew up and started experimenting with hat-making on his patient mother; the first was a neat navy-blue model that she would wear to the shops and church. CSM called by the time he was due to leave school and after proving his mettle against the naysayers – with backing from course founder and director Bobby Hillson, a renowned illustrator – he began interning for Shirley Hex, head of millinery at now-defunct British couture house Lachasse. “She taught me techniques she’d learned in the 1950s, but eventually had to push me out of the nest [so I could] go and find my own way,” he says. “She made the point that those crafts were right for her day, but I had to find new ways to express myself. I cried buckets of course, but it was the best thing for me.” The tears had dried by the time Jean Paul Gaultier, Claude Montana and Thierry Mugler called. The former involved some fantastical creations; elongated masks, the eye holes fringed in magenta tears. Or pom-pom- topped berets alongside a 1984 collection of velvet conical bra dresses that would go on to become part of fashion (and music) history. Jones also crafted hats for Azzedine Alaïa, from delicate, twisted horns to the lightest spray of polka-dot netting swept across the forehead or shadowing the eyes. “I would position a hat in front of Azzedine, step back and then just adjust it in a way that wasn’t so obvious. He’d call that a ‘chic et le chapeau’, this little element that just makes it look chic, less deliberately ‘positioned’.”

The dance of creative collaboration excites Jones. Rei Kawakubo at Comme des Garçons will famously charge him with just a single word, and from that he’ll form the hats for a collection. “You get one word from Rei, and from that you’d have to get it wrong. That’s the process. Because if you did what you think Rei would want, what you think Comme des Garçons is, it wouldn’t work. You have to create the thing you know. Once I was making these very simple straw hats and I spoke to Adrian [Joffe, Kawakubo’s business and life partner] about how we could make them less classic, less English, more Japanese. He said, ‘No, Rei wants an English gentleman’s way of making hats.’” Maria Grazia Chiuri at Dior is different, he says. She prefers hats that “every young fashionable girl in the world could wear”. With Kim Jones, her counterpart at Dior Men, it’s a conversation of a different kind, “about an artist who’s worked on the collection perhaps, or a story, a narrative, a feeling. Sometimes a designer takes you somewhere you never thought you’d go in terms of creativity and learning.”

The one to do so more than any other, says Jones, is John Galliano. They joined forces in 1992 and created some of the most spellbinding pieces of their careers, as Galliano ascended to new heights at Christian Dior couture, from Egyptian Anubis masks to exaggerated Napoleonic tricorns and every other surrealist wonderscape in hat form you can imagine. Jones is nostalgic about his work with Galliano, which continues today under Maison Margiela. “I was hungry to work with John from the minute I saw his first collections. There was something in me that loved and longed for that British charm and sense of dysfunction, that idiosyncrasy and his sheer creative magic. That was what he brought to the table. We had an amazing time together. It was an adventure.”

For a figure so seismic and integral in the machinations of international fashion, Jones is steadfastly low key; on the occasions I’ve been backstage and happened to glimpse him in action, there’s a sense of quiet methodology amid the freneticism that occurs before a fashion show.

“The hat’s the final element to the look, so I’m often the last person to work on a look before a model goes on the runway and it’s my job to make them feel confident and gorgeous. I’ll talk the entire time, making sure they’re comfortable. You can calm people with a hat because it’s very centring. And they lift their head and see how it changes their make-up, their air, the persona they want to project on that catwalk.” Jones as model whisperer, as it were.

Jones, who married his long-term partner Craig West (head of the Stephen Jones Millinery studio) in 2014, is a calm, kind soul. Those words might sound trite and rather twee, but they’re somewhat rare qualities in the industry. I’ve observed everything from a twinkle in his eye at a Claridge’s event to a moment drinking in the mesmerising view of the Great Pyramids of Giza before a stupendous Dior Men collection stage. Then back to work.

“I always say that hats stumbled across me, and I stumbled across them,” he says in typically self-effacing manner of what ignited his love of head adornment. It was the structure of hats, their solidity and form, that transfixed a young Jones. “It was a fully constructed object, like a ceramic pot or a flower arrangement, and that appealed to me. I quickly learned that I loved the immediacy of making a hat; you could do it yourself instead of waiting for fabric suppliers and pattern cutters. There was a charm about hats that I found engaging and lovely.”

Jones’s singular style language in the world of hats is what sets him apart; they’re cheeky, irreverent and exceptionally crafted. A top hat, but with exaggerated curves on the main structure instead of stately and straight; a beret, but arch it theatrically. He can craft something fantastical and otherworldly, of course, but he can also produce an appropriate boater hat for Princess Diana and fascinators for Meghan Markle. “My aesthetic? Well, I think a hat needs to have fun and lightness to it. A hat’s a fantastic disguise, as well as a fantastic statement. You have to wear clothes every day, but you make a conscious decision to put on a hat.”

There is a completely charming sense of astonishment to Jones that somehow, despite the protestations of those early tutors and the changing winds of fashion across the decades, he’s still making hats with relish. “What’s the place of the milliner in 21st-century fashion? First, I have to emphasise how happy I am that there is a place for millinery today. When I first started, that wasn’t necessarily always going to be the case. People say today, ‘You don’t see many hats’. Perhaps not the hats you’re thinking of, but you absolutely do see them everywhere: beanies, flat caps, baseball caps. Hats used to be representative of a certain kind of politeness, of orthodoxy, of propriety, of the church. In time, that’s been lost, but they’re part of the fabric of how we dress.”

What words of advice does he have for young milliners who are hoping to recreate his success? “How great that you found hats, and that hats have found you!” he says with a laugh. “I’d tell them that it’s tough to make a living, but it’s rewarding, too. You have to really, really love it. When it’s 4am and you’re unpicking the seams on an entire hat [because you need to start again] it has to be, because you want to get it absolutely perfect.”

That said, Jones worked himself too hard at points. The perception of his life in the early days might have been one of club kid revelry, but in actual fact most nights he was in his studio, working until dawn on a project destined either for his own line or the Paris catwalks. “I certainly have no regrets, but I would perhaps tell myself to put that hat down and go to the party. Accept the invitation. You never know where it might lead, who you might meet.”

The pace of fashion has changed, of course, but Jones remains steadfastly calm amid the frenetic shifts the industry has seen in his 40-plus years of working. “But the need to belong to a club through how you present yourself, that’s still the same,” he says. That tribality, the sense of belonging, is innate, no matter the machinations of global conglomerates, the hype around drops and the social media frenzy that is 21st-century fashion. “That’s true whether you’re dressing to show your allegiance to Prada or the ladies at your local WI in the village hall,” says the milliner. “It’s true of football supporters and fashion fanatics. You wear clothes – and hats – to convince yourself and others that you’re a certain way. Fashion is still a fabulous, fabulous lie.” And Stephen Jones’s whimsical headpieces tell us just what we want to hear.

Issue 23 of 10 Men Australia – PRECISION, CRAFT, LUXURY – is out NOW.

Photographer KASIA WOZNIAK
Fashion Editor and Talent STEPHEN JONES
Text STEPHEN DOIG
Make-up FAYE BLUFF using Dior Forever Foundation and Capture Totale Le Serum
Photographer’s assistant CAMILLE LIU
Fashion assistants CHRISSIE TRAPL, SONYA MAZURYK and GEORGIA EDWARDS

Special thanks to ANNIKA LIEVESLEY