STEPHEN JONES FEELS CURIOUSLY naked without a hat -– as well he might since he's as bald as a billiard ball, with round, boyish features that all manner of millinery seems to flatter. Actually, he has a different hat for every day of the week, perhaps even one for every day of the year.
So what's he wearing today?
The master milliner who makes beautifully idiosyncratic, wildly eccentric hats for John Galliano at Dior, as well as for private clients such as Kylie Minogue, Gwen Stefani, Alison Goldfrapp and Beyoncé, disappears for
a moment and returns wearing a flat cap at rather a jaunty angle.
However, it's not the sort of tweedy number the unspeakable might wear in pursuit of the uneatable. Rather, it's pristine white and latticed with black braid; it's his "Jacobethan" hat, influenced by both Jacobean and Elizabethan architecture.
We are behind the scenes at the 51-year-old's small shop in Covent Garden, which also accommodates his offices, studio and workshops. His latest commission is to design the millinery for Eternal Light, an unusual ballet requiem created by Rambert Dance Company, Britain's oldest ballet troupe. In addition to an enormous toucan headdress, Jones has made a crown of feathers trembling with Swarovski crystals, which he places on the head of Rambert ballerina Pieter Symonds, who has just swept into the room for her fitting. The New Zealand-born dancer swoops and pirouettes gracefully, rehearsing some of the moves she will perform in artistic director Mark Baldwin's new work.
Jones asks Symonds how the crown of feathers feels on her head. "Just wonderful," she replies, admiring her reflection in the wall of mirrors as she spins around, arching her neck and dipping her head down to the floor.
But can Jones create hats that will stay on the dancers' heads as they birl beautifully around the stage? Can you fouette in a hat? Apparently expertise, elastic and little buckles are involved. However, hair-gripping a dancer's headpiece into place with bobby pins isn't an option since they have so many quick changes. This is a little trick, Jones confides, making tiny adjustments to Symonds's spangly crown, that he learned from Madonna. As you do.
"Making hats for the ballet is very different to creating them for a couture catwalk show," says Jones, who is no stranger to meeting the outrageous demands of fashion designers, such as Comme des Garçons, Jean Paul Gaultier and Vivienne Westwood, as well as Galliano, whom he has known since they hung out together on the London club scene in the late 1970s.
In those days, Jones also spent time at the Blitz Club with Leigh Bowery, Boy George (with whom he shared a squat "but most definitely not a bed", and for whom he still makes hats), Marilyn and the rest of the new romantics. Back then, he reckons, dressing up was a laugh, and gave people a sense of freedom.
He says: "Clothing should be fun, not chic or elegant or well-dressed. It has to be entertainment, as art. I see clothing as an expression, although even high-fashion extravagances still need to possess functionality. Aesthetically and practically, hats don't have to, so they really are the cherry on the cake."
The son of a middle-class family, Jones was born in West Kirby and raised in the Wirral. He studied at St Martin's School of Art. It was while out clubbing that he and Galliano first met, and the latter begged the "rather grand" student to design his graduation show. At first Jones refused to work with him, but the pair have since forged a legendary creative partnership, of which Jones says, softly: "I trust him and his talent totally, although I don't always understand where he's taking us.
"Every season, John walks us into the abyss and brings us out the other side."
For Galliano (at Dior and his eponymous label), he's made hats from anything and everything, including lollipop sticks, safety pins, broken light bulbs, egg- cartons and even giant inflatable animals. According to Galliano: "Everything Stephen does looks simply blown together. That is the art of millinery and he's the best at it."
At London Fashion Week last month, Jones's hats for Jaeger, London, were pronounced "wonderful" by the fashion press. He has made hats for Princess Diana and once put Erin O'Connor in a 3ft-tall Egyptian headdress for a Galliano show, which took three weeks to make and involved fabric toiles (a rough shape in calico), vacuum-formed plastic, metal plating, gold leafing and trips to Paris and Scotland.
"I wanted her (O'Connor] to wear it on the back of her head and, to do that, it could only weigh about a pound," recalls Jones. "I had to work out the balance and how much weight the head could support, how strong her neck muscles were." The photograph of O'Connor wearing the headdress made the front pages of 72 newspapers worldwide.
Similarly, while working with Rambert, Jones has had to be aware of the pressure on a dancer's neck if they are wearing a headdress and, therefore, how light it has to be. The toucan headdress, which will surely transform the dancer who wears it into an exotic bird of paradise, is worked with light papier mâché on a lightweight wooden base, rather like the way an old-fashioned biplane is made. Since the toucan's beak extends a long way from the dancer's body, it defines what movements the dancer can make.
"It's been so interesting to make this, because hats are all about the illusion of weightlessness and flight," he says.
His work is already represented in the V&A's permanent collection. However, in February, he will be honoured by the museum with a major exhibition, Anthology of Hats. It will be the crowning glory of a career that has literally put the lid on fashion, for Jones has proved that nothing succeeds in fashion like excess, especially an excess of glamour.
"Hats give women the sense of fantasy that they crave," he declares. "They turn clothes into fashion."
Jones recently launched his first fragrance, a collaboration with Comme des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubo, who, in 2005, turned over her store in London's Dover Street Market to celebrate his 25 years in the business. So what does Stephen Jones by Comme des Garçons smell like? "Think the Queen Mother!" he exclaims. After discounting gin, dogs and horses, I suggest: "Powdery, perhaps?"
"You've got it!" he exclaims, before adding that his scent also has top notes of roses and carnations but that ultimately it smells "like a meteorite crashing into a violet". It is packaged in a decadent black bottle based on a design for an old ink bottle from the 1890s. And, of course, it comes in a hat box, says the head master, doffing his flat cap to me as we part.
• Rambert Dance Company, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, 29-31 October, tickets £10-£24 (0131–529 6000,
www.eft.co.uk).
• Stephen Jones Millinery, 36 Great Queen Street, London (0207 242 0770,
www.stephenjonesmillinery.com).
