Stephen Jones’ hats: A party on your head

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1:15The hat maker Stephen Jones famously made hats for 1980s pop icons like Boy George and royalty like Diana, Princess of Wales. He created a tweed crown for British fashion designer Vivian Westwood He calls hats a party on your head. Welcome to the documentary In the Studio from the BBC World Service with me, Rosa Johnston-Flynt, where we investigate how some of the most creative people work. Stephen grew up in the north-west of England, the son of an engineer, and today his hats are seen at the Met Gala in New York and on the runways of Paris, a city which has embraced him. He's only the second hatmaker to have an exhibition in his honour at the prestigious Palais Galliera Fashion Museum, where I meet him as he's about to put his next collection together.

2:11Somewhere around the world, hats are always having a revival. But certainly here in France, we've had an extraordinary response to the exhibition. We've had almost 100 ,000 visitors and everybody leaving has said, hats, hats, let's hats be part of our language again. A lot of my work in Paris here has been with Christian Dior and this is a display of Christian Dior hats. So they're all on mannequins that are wearing outfits so you really see how the hat interacts with the clothing. Yeah, absolutely. I started to work with Dior almost 30 years ago now. I first went there with John Galliano and here we have a display of John Galliano hats.

2:53We're all attracted to Paris. It's all a magnet, whether it's just looking over there, Iris van Herpen, who's Dutch, or Tom Brown, who's American. Which one is that? Is that the red one? Iris van Herpen is this black one. This is an extraordinary hat. It has a little fan in it. There was a perfume made specially for it. There's a speaker in it as well. And the hat is an expression of the senses, and it also lit up as well. It's very minimal because you're describing lots of functions, but it's this sort of piece of perspex is it and it's quite flat yeah but it's an extraordinary shape as well and this is what you're doing for a fashion show you're creating a sensation which is a very different brief for making a hat to wear on a monday morning to walk the dogs in or a hat to go to a party in yeah i think you'll get some funny looks on the train wearing that one but you get a seat certainly and you would probably improve the atmosphere of any train that you got into.

3:49So looking around this exhibition of your work, are there any ideas that you would want to revisit? Yes, there's so many ideas and also so many things here I'd actually forgotten about because they were 30 years ago, 40 years ago almost. And maybe you're not going to take it exactly, but maybe I could do something sparkly next season. Maybe I should do something which is very cultural and or something which is very sculptural. And you know, fashion for it to make sense has got to be right for the time. It's a new adventure. I'm thinking of my summer 2026, and I was just looking at my wardrobe in particular and thinking there's so much black in it, and thinking about the display here, a series of boxes showing the life cycle of a hat, and in fact the background of the boxes is all like a rainbow, multicolored, and I thought well maybe I could do multicolored hats.

4:42I've never done that before, so there's always something new. Is that something that you're putting in the maybe pile or you're taking to the drawing board? There's always a maybe pile. I have a large carrier bag next to my desk in London and I do lots of ideas on paper and I throw them in occasionally and every six months I pull them all out and most of them are complete rubbish and go straight in the bin but sometimes there's some good ideas too. Those ideas were refined over the next few months, and I meet Stephen again at his studio in London's Covent Garden. He's working on his spring-summer 2026 millinery collection, which will be unveiled at London Fashion Week in September.

5:23Stephen studied just down the road at Central St Martins, the famous art college where he started studying fashion, but quickly switched to hats. It always looks a bit weird, but it's pushed to the back, right? The workshop is buzzing with preparations, and I can't wait to find out whether that multicoloured theme, A Rainbow Sparked in Paris, will have survived the carrier bag purge. Is this the title? I can see a book on the table in front of us which says A Rainbow in Curved Air. Yes. A Rainbow in Curved Air was actually a song, but funnily enough, Curved Air was also the name of a band, And when I was in my, probably my second week at St Martin's, I became their stylist for a while.

6:08So you are weaving parts of your history into this new collection. I mean, I think you can't escape your history. Why not embrace it? New is within the great panorama of time. Stephen is currently taking the collection through a process he calls dressing up, which involves creating basic prototypes of the hats that he has sketched and letting people try them on freely to see if they work as a piece of headwear. So it's a bit of a mystery shopping almost, a sort of allowing somebody to have a natural reaction. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, when they put it on upside down and back to front, I'm not going to say, no, that's wrong, because it's how they think it should look or just how they've picked it up.

6:51Also, it's a learning experience for me because you never know, maybe the hat's going to look better back to front and upside down anyway. And who are the people trying on the hats? Are they people from the hat world or models? It's my staff, really, who are going to be trying these things on. And sometimes myself, too. Even though I can see what they're like on other people, it's often when I put the hat on, I see a refinement of the balance, maybe of the comfort, and a little bit, how does it look? I wondered why you approach your collections in this way. Is this something you've done for a long time, this dressing up process?

7:29Every collection is born in a slightly different way. And there's certain things which happen the same and have happened the same for almost 50 years now. But some things which are completely new. I design in my head every day and I write things down. I sketch things every day. And sometimes that's the route that design takes. but sometimes it is just a whim. I'm a hat wearer. I'm rarely seen without a baseball cap. I think that hats tell people something about us, about who we are and what we're doing. After 45 years, Stephen knows who his customers are. I want to know how he assembles his ideas and develops them.

8:15So I put this in a book just so it's easy to keep all the notes together. It's a sort of sketchbook and a mood board all in one. This is something that also I learned from working with John Galliano. Because we were working on Givenchy first and Galliano collections and then Dior, we were always moving from one location to another. So we never did mood boards because you couldn't carry those with you. So what we always had was A4 or A3 books with all the information in it. So here you've got some pictures from Breakfast at Tiffany, I think. Yes, this is Breakfast at Tiffany's, and this is a hat I did before, and this was the colour of pink that I wanted.

8:57It's like a sort of swatch, as if you were going to put paint on the wall or something. Yes. I was aware that colour changes during time of day, so the whole collection is structured within this idea of dawn, noon and dusk. And I thought, well, what sort of hat would you want to have for first thing in the morning, and how does that coincide with a rainbow? red, orange, yellow, blah, blah, blah. And if I think of a red first thing in the morning, you don't really want a red, but you probably want something paler, which is a pink. So it's a pink eye mask. Is this taking us through the day then, this book?

9:35Yes, this is taking us, yeah. I mean, it starts at six o 'clock in the morning and ends at midnight. Wow, so it's a hat for every moment of the day. Yes, yeah. And so there's a mask here, which is in pink satin, trimmed with feathers, embroidery on the eyelids in transparent sequins, eyelashes made out of acetate, eyebrows which is embroidered on in metallic black yarn. And these are all ideas that you've had while you're sketching. You've decided some of these materials at that point of drawing it. It's quite a long process. I've been working on this for about four months already, from a tiny little thumbnail sketch in a little notebook that I carry with me every day to actually I was illustrating this in colour yesterday as a final sketch because we have the prototype here as well for us to see.

10:28I follow Stephen to a row of model heads with the hat designs perched on top, all at varying stages of completion. Some seem nearly finished, and then looking closer, I notice pieces of card and paper in place of fabric. It's about putting ideas to the test, just like clothes designers create a toile or practice garment in a plain, inexpensive fabric. He wants to make sure it works before committing to the final design. So this is the mask. The eye mask. A pair of closed eyes with big black eyelashes and then this sort of wonderful baby pink. feathery frill around the edge so it just looks so fabulous and flamboyant well i hope it will be this is again is just the twine of it it's made in paper it's made from paper yeah when we're doing something like this we always just use the simplest and quickest way what's most effective so it's sort of made in paper with black cardboard lashes at the moment but it does have its soft pink frill around the edge do you think you're happy with that aspect and that might stay Well, in fact, we were trying this on yesterday, and I wasn't sure about the frill coming downwards.

11:43But I think that if people get this, they won't actually wear it on their face. They're going to wear it on their forehead. And what the feathers do is it gives a very pretty silhouette going all the way around. So I think we're going to leave it as it is. Otherwise you'd be sneezing in your sleep. Exactly. I wondered, because since we last saw each other in Paris, you have travelled around so much. Are there any other things that have crept in, any other influences or key tones or notes? So many things every day. But what I've tried to do is I keep that for the next collection, because otherwise the story is confused.

12:22And so what comes after the eye mask? After comes yoga, a hat called yoga. Yoga is a practical piece of headwear, and it reminds me of a bucket hat, usually made of cotton with a brim of equal depth all the way round, just like the one we all wore to see UK rock band Oasis recently. It seems quite straightforward at first glance, but there's a lot of intricacy in this design. I thought, well, colours first thing in the morning, what is the most beautiful colour? The golden first light falling on somebody's face. So this hat has a little birum, transparent in pale peach acetate. So the shadow of that falling on the face is really, really beautiful.

13:09And then the crown of it, which is the top part of it, is in tulle. So it's incredibly light and it's probably going to have some embroidery on it, but I don't really know yet. It's important that the design is not trapped by the sketch. You also have to learn to adapt and let it become something else. And what's so interesting here is that you're talking about this hat in colour, in texture, but all I can see is a pencil sketch with just some grey lines and then a few pictures of big sunset and sunrise skies. Ah, it's all sunrise. The light and mood of each part of a day anchors the collection.

13:50From a headband topped with a bright yellow flash of feathers to a leaf green trilby based on a luscious smoothie in a glass. After green comes blue, a wide-brimmed straw hat called Gainsborough, inspired by the 18th century English painter. So the last hat of this Dawn series is called Shade, and it's a beret, which is a very understandable shape. And what I love, and this is a photograph actually of Palm Springs in America, and this is dawn and I love the you know the blue sky the golden sun and the purple mountains however we were trying all sorts of different shades of purple it really did not work at all and look very 70s suburban British and it's not what you're going for this not really what I'm going for not in this collection anyway so the colors have shifted slightly and in fact it's going to be silver and mauve straw and this beret is a solid base but then it has loops of different machine straws wrapping it in a irregular and slightly jagged way as when you look at the skyline of mountains it's sort of jagged but it's mauvey and it's in shadow anyway you never really know which are going to be the successful hats or non-successful hats.

15:16I'd been expecting a beret At the exhibition in Paris, Stephen had told me that he usually has one in every collection. A beret is the t-shirt of hats. You know, it suits men, women, children. It's a very simple shape. Even though I do fancy berets, I know that the best, best, best berets are plain black felt beret. And it doesn't matter if you've bought it on the Rue de Rivoli for€3 or you've bought it at Christian Dior for€800. euros but it is also a symbol of France. And it's clear from the cabinet we're looking at there's an extraordinary fluffy blue beret with a cigarette poking out of it and little pieces of wire with jewels on them that look like smoke.

16:02I mean we actually call the little stick that comes out of the top of a knitted beret the cigarette so I decided because it's France we should have a cigarette coming out of the top with little bits of smoke. So you've taken the terminology and played with that. Yes you have an idea of what things should look like we twist it slightly it's like the very basic thing that a milliner can do. In a funny way making a beret is almost like a ballerina going to bar class you still have to go back every day and do the basic things and for me the basic thing is the beret I come back to it every collection.

16:42We focus on the part of the internet that most people don't know about. It's called the dark web. Undercover in the furthest corners of the dark web, US special agents are on a mission to locate and rescue children from abuse. Move in now. From the BBC World Service, World of Secrets, the darkest web follows their shocking investigations. Search for World of Secrets wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

17:36and how to make those markets work for you. Follow Merrin Talks Money on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. You're listening to the documentary In the Studio from the BBC World Service with hat designer Stephen Jones preparing his new collection at his London workshop. Hi Stephen. Nice to see you again. How are you doing? One hat, a brilliant white oval headpiece designed to be worn in the middle of the day, has its origins on the catwalk. I originally created this hat for Kate Moss in 1995 and I've never really done a hat like this since. So I've done the same silhouette of the hat but in white straw and it's embroidered with large yellow rhinestones.

18:27So it's going to be very sparkly. So what comes next? This is a hat called topiary and I thought, well what's green in the summer at midday and I just thought of vegetation and a top hat is something that I do every season and at the moment we're experimenting with making a bow out of cellophane which looks wonderful but the bow actually might go on to the Gainsborough hat for that one what I might do is take the beautiful silk taffeta and actually wrap the taffeta in cellophane and not use it for this one even though it looks very pretty but I don't know yet. I must say I'm getting a real sense of fun from this collection.

19:12Well hats are all about fun I think that's the most important purpose I mean to beautify but just to put people in a good mood. Do you have to get all of these across the line to some extent or could you potentially change them? They will change absolutely and they probably will be all shown in the collection but I will definitely have a favourite the day that they're shown. What might you base your favourite on? I think the ones which are most successful you just think is it a good hat? And how many hats are you making in total for this collection because we've gone from one to six and you said that's the morning.

19:51Yeah and then there's noon when all colours are very bright so I thought of what was the most perfect bright red hat and I thought, well, that might be inspired by a red car in the sunshine. And then all the evening hats are much darker, like dark metallic purple, dark metallic green, dark metallic blue. We move back to the table of prototypes and have a look at a red hat called Corvette that takes its inspiration from the American car, a very striking headpiece, but it's nothing like the drawings I'd seen. This one I recognise now from the sketch, but it's not red. Again, this one's card. This is very much work in progress, but you can see a little bit of how it is going to be in real life.

20:36It's red straw, which is shiny, made in Switzerland specially for us. And this is mounted on those little strips like ribbons of straw, which are attached to a woven straw. And this is made in the Philippines. The interesting thing about hats is for hundreds of years, people have been using materials from all over the world. The wire inside comes from France. It's such a global product, isn't it? Oh yes, and then it has this metal trimming on it. Well, it's not actually metal, it's plastic, and this comes from Korea. It does also look like a challenging hat to balance because it's this sort of shot of red that lies straight across your head like a big red arrow.

21:21I can imagine there are some issues with balancing and weight. Well, this is extremely light and it's going to be mounted on a little cap. And somebody will probably wear these hats to Ascot. So they want to look very striking. People will have to step out of the way, I think. But it's not as big as many of the hats that people do wear. In a funny way, when I create hats for a fashion show, those are hats to be seen from 10 metres away, 20 metres away. When I'm making a hat for my own collection, that's very much about how does that hat look over a lunch table. You're right, these are not as big as some of the hats I've seen for horse racing, like Ascot and things like that.

22:04They are very neat, and so I suppose this being the biggest of the collection that I've seen so far. It feels bigger. Well, if you want a bigger hat, this is the bicorne. That one must be closer to being finished because this one looks quite a lot like the vision you were describing. Yes, we're actually going to remake it because it wobbles a bit. You can do a drawing, you can make the hat. It's actually how the person is when they're wearing it. What does it do? How does it feel? So we're going to remake this using a different technique. Perhaps a different type of wire or something like that?

22:40Well, I'm just going to ask my assistant Annika to come through, and I'm going to try a hat on her. Annika? Yes. Well, I realise why this is so wobbly. Because only the edge of the ribbon is attached, and the wire is not attached to the frame. So if that is attached to the frame there, it won't wobble as much. So we may have found a solution. Yes, because yesterday it was wobbling like a jelly. I returned to Stephen's workshop to see the finished hats as London Fashion Week hits full swing. Invited guests wind their way through the Rainbow in Curved Air collection, trying on the finished pieces.

23:23It's here. Yeah, it's here. And how do you feel when you see your collection all presented like this, everything assembled? I'm delighted by the freshness of it. So the topiary top hat, I think it's come out exactly as you were describing. It's the sort of outline of a top hat, but made with winding little creeping roses, white roses. Yes, it was like a pergola. I do love that. It was very difficult to get there. We had to redo that many, many times, because what would happen is when we made the flowers look lush enough, we actually lost the shape of the top hat and it started to look like a blob.

24:02Like a bunch of flowers, maybe. Yeah, we had to rework it many times, but we got there in the end. And I was curious to know how the French bicorn hat turned out. I'll bring that over to you, should I? That one was quite wobbly, I think. Yes, the wobbly bicorn. Well, what we did is we changed the wire and changed the fixing. And this is much more sturdy now. Oh, yeah, the only thing wobbling really are the frilly feathers. The little feathers, yeah. The pom-pom of feathers that kind of dances around. In this really wonderful royal blue and white. And one of the hats that I most wanted to see finished was the eye mask that could be an eye mask, could be a hat.

24:42Yes. When we last saw it, it was made out of paper, but it did have the floaty pink feathers all around it. Yes. So the eyelids are more structured, but the actual base of the mask itself is completely flexible. So you could wear it in bed. Oh, yes, absolutely. Would you mind showing me how that one has turned out? I'm really keen to see. So when we look at this, this is how it is. So it's very fluffy. Initially, I was going to cut some of these feathers down at the base, but we thought, no, I'll as well go for it. So it's made from quilted pink silt satin, and the eyebrows are embroidered by a company called Hand and Lock.

25:25And whereabouts are they based? They're in London and Locke's actually did the embroidery for Majesty Queen Elizabeth's wedding dress, for example. They're one of the oldest surviving British embroiderers. And then the eyelashes are cut from acetate and this tiny little transparent sequence to give an idea of shine. And if we look on the inside, it's all quilted. So it's very soft on Madame's real eyes, you see. it does look like a sort of pillow that you put on your eyes yes pillow talk but I can imagine it being worn on your head as a hat because it's just so theatrical oh yes absolutely and in fact this morning when we were showing my new collection I tried that on a few times because it also coordinated very well with the pink and black suit that I was wearing and I do find this idea interesting of theatre we've spoken quite a bit about art in hat making but there's a lot of theatre involved as well oh yeah well it's all a mask it's all about acting out that part and the hat is part of your script and sometimes hats are theatrical because people want to be theatrical and maybe they are not but the hat can be theatrical for them so if you want to make a huge entrance to a fun party, maybe you're not feeling so fun yourself at that particular time, put on the hat and you'll be the centre of attention.

26:56It's your co-star. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe it's your leading lady sometimes. Cue one of Stephen's leading ladies. Virginia Bates is an actress and vintage clothing expert. She's been a firm friend and loyal customer of Stephen's for around 20 years and is about to model that pink satin eye mask hat. For me, the most remarkable piece in the show. If you... Let's pull this chair. I normally work through the mirror like a hairdresser does. So Virginia sits in front of the mirror so that she can see what you're doing. Well, she's not going to see what I'm doing, but it's wonderful because, you know, when you close it down, it's like this, and it's lovely and comfortable.

27:37Oh, I love it. And you do look amazing, Virginia, in there. Of course, you can't see yourself. And then I lift it up very gently, and you can put it on your forehead like this, you see. What's so great is it actually works as a mask. It does work as a mask because it's quilted on the inside. It's brilliant. So if you were somewhere where it was a bit boring, you could just sort of shut off. Yes. It's super fun. If you need to take a snooze in the dinner party. I mean, also, it can be worn slightly half-masked too. So you can be shaded. Oh, do you know what? I'd wear that at Ascot. Yes. I think it's great.

28:12Yeah. It's a hoot. Stephen wants people to find hope, optimism and fun in his creations and is delighted with his journey through colour. You've been listening to Stephen Jones for the documentary In the Studio from the BBC World Service. It was presented and produced by me, Rosa Johnston-Flint, and the executive producer was Paula McGrath.

28:45We focus on the part of the internet that most people don't know about. It's called the dark web. Undercover in the furthest corners of the dark web, US special agents are on a mission to locate and rescue children from abuse. Move in now. From the BBC World Service, World of Secrets, the darkest web follows their shocking investigations. Search for World of Secrets wherever you get your BBC podcasts.