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As Mr. Jones recalled: “Jean Paul said to me: ‘I love your look. Would you like to create some hats for my next show?’” Mr. Jones sat down and drew a clutch of bright felt fezzes with swishy tassels. Mr. Gaultier hired him on the spot.
“That’s how I started in Paris,” Mr. Jones said.
Soon Mr. Jones was making hats for Claude Montana, who was the head of couture for Lanvin, and for Ms. Kawakubo at Comme des Garçons, which had recently started showing in Paris. He had met Ms. Kawakubo when she approached him in an airport in Alaska during a refueling stop on the way to Tokyo and said, “Stephen Jones, I like your hats.” He made many for her, like the black wool felt toque, designed for a pink jersey pantsuit with matching gloved hands hugging the torso, which is one of the ensembles on display.
Mr. Jones’s longest association has been with the British designer John Galliano. They met in the early 1990s in Paris, and they found such harmony together that they carried on their partnership for decades — at Givenchy, Christian Dior and Maison Margiela and at Mr. Galliano’s namesake label. Among their joint looks in the show: a couture opera coat in gold and blue striped taffeta, for which Mr. Jones crafted enormous daisies to envelop the head, and a gown awash in copper sequins, worn with a copper wire crown by Mr. Jones that was decorated with amber sea horses and scallop shells and framed with a long fringe of copper resin beads.
In the center room, a film is projected of Mr. Jones making a fascinator with a sculpted 3-D Eiffel Tower in black silk taffeta ribbon. Mr. Jones takes a cardboard model of the Eiffel Tower and wraps it with the ribbon in a crisscross manner. Then, with a thimble on his forefinger, he pins the ribbon in place, sews it, adds a shimmery pink tuff of tulle on the top, slides it off the cardboard and onto a black wire Eiffel Tower frame, and affixes it to a wire headband. In a matter of minutes, a hat is born.
Today Mr. Jones is the creative director of hats at Dior — “28 years,” he said proudly — while still freelancing for other houses and running his Covent Garden studio and shop. For while Mr. Jones has carried on his love affair with Paris for decades, he still lives in London.
“When I’m in Paris, I stay in a little hotel around the corner from Dior,” he said. It has silk on the walls.
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