‘The ultimate accessory’
When travelling to our garden party I passed through Waterloo Station where I was amazed and delighted to see the ladies on their way to Ascot wearing colourful dresses and a wide range of frivolous hats. Of course, the men sported grey or black ‘toppers’.
This reminded me of my visit to Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones at the V&A.
Jones has produced two hat collections a year since graduating from St. Martin’s School of Art in 1979. He said that ‘I simply live my life and put it into a hat’. He has worked with Jean Paul Gaultier, Vivienne Westwood, Thierry Mugler, Christian Dior, Mark Jacobs, Comme des Garçons and John Galliano.
This exhibition was a treasure box of hats, displaying a huge range from an early jesters leather hat to tricornes and bicornes, Victorian bonnets, straw hats, knitted hats and hats worn in films and shows and many more. Jones’s designs for fashion shows are creative, experimental and sometimes whimsical. Many were made from materials not usually associated with fashionable headwear such as wood, plastic and rubber. One was in the form of a Balaclava helmet of brown fur which reached the knees of the mannequin.
Sources of inspiration included architecture, geometry, travel and the natural world and many showed a topical element of their time. In London for instance ideas can be gleaned from tubes, taxis, palaces, policemen or street style. Obviously, designs for work wear hats such as those for air stewardesses require a totally practical approach.
Music evocative of the 1930s played as we watched videos of hats being made with the milliners sitting round a large table with their materials in the centre. Prototype hats are shaped on a calico covered head known as a ‘poupee’. The hat mould ‘block’ is usually made of wood, this is an essential tool of the workroom. Milliners often amass a huge collection of blocks which can be used time and time again. Straws, felts and fabrics remain key materials, other materials are sourced from all over the world, feathers from South America and Africa, silk flowers from France and ribbons from Germany.
Jones states that a milliner’s workroom is ‘half an Aladdin’s Cave and half an artists studio’, a place where each hat is carefully coaxed into being. In the video Jones is smartly dressed totally in black, I was just thinking that he reminded me of Boy George when he said that he had designed hats for him. Another quaint video showed ladies from the middle of the last century trying on hats and explained which hats suited certain types of faces.
A French fashion editor noted, when choosing a hat it is important to ‘take the one you fall in love with, which mysteriously ‘does something’ for you, which magically makes you feel more beautiful’.
I hope you will take this advice.