Stephen Jones: In-focus

How do you see the evolution of how people see and wear hats throughout your career?

SJ: It’s very different, hats used to be very much occasion wear and now they have polarised it to be fantasy or totally functional as a beanie on a Monday morning.

Tell us about your design process. Where do you start? How do you think about the hat and the body?

SJ: I live my life and put it into a hat, so I never really stop designing in my head it’s just occasionally those ideas are put down on paper and become hats. I always think about the hat with the body because a hat is not a separate object it needs to become a part of the person

Tell us about your ability to bring other designers' vision to life. How are you able to be so creatively adaptable through your numerous collaborations and long-spanning relationships?

SJ: It’s really about bringing their imagination to life, it’s what we create together. That’s the key they couldn’t do it themselves and I couldn’t do it myself, it’s something we do together. I have to get inside their mind which is very unusual for an outsider.

" I live my life and put it into a hat. "

Tell us about your mentorship with Shirley Hex. How do you see the importance of learning the rules before you break them?

SJ: My time with Shirley Hex was extraordinary and she taught me the main principals of millinery, however after a couple of years she forced me out the nest and encouraged me to develop my own style in my own way.

How does British, London, and/or Paris culture influence your work?

SJ: Completely; British culture is a weird dichotomy of something that is very aristocratic or something that is very punk, but Paris brings something which is coquettish and mannered.

" It’s really about bringing their imagination to life, it’s what we create together. "

You've experimented with so many unconventional materials, how do you decide a material is meaningful to transform into a hat?

SJ: Well it has to serve the purpose of what the hat is trying to be, but also when you are making it, the hat serves the purpose of the fabric.

The Palais Galliera devoted a full retrospective to your work, what was it like seeing your work in this presentation? What do you want your legacy to be?

SJ: Number 1 it is an extraordinary honour to be included there. I could see my work, almost in the 3rd person, I didn’t see it as being uniquely personal but saw it as it being presented to others and I could analyse it quite dryly. My legacy to be that the pursuit of dressing can be a wonderful extension either of your character or who you want to be.

What do you think is a misconception about hats and the process of creating them?

SJ: That they are quick and easy, it’s very laborious because they are 3d objects.

Do you feel your design process is more learned or instinctual?

SJ: I think it’s a conversation of the two. I love learning about a particular subject and trying to transform that into a hat, but at the same time spontaneous expression is important because it looks fresh.

What other mediums of art inspire your hats the most?

SJ: I would probably say the most is architecture but nature as well as painting and sculpture, but the form of everything and everything, whether it’s an Opera or an apple, they tell a specific story.

SJ: Is there a hat you would never wear?

I would try everything, but not wear things which I didn’t feel were convincing i.e. a cowboy hat

What made the environment and culture of The Blitz a fertile ground for creativity?

SJ: Because it filled the vacuum that had been left by punk.

Do you have any favorite young milliners?

SJ: As the Chairman of the British Hat Guild, I am not allowed to say whether I do have or not

Where do you think people's fear around wearing hats comes from?

SJ: Sometimes it’s the fear of standing out too much and therefore assuming a greater importance than they feel they should have but often you can hide underneath hats too and hats can be the conversation for you.

Is there a hat that got away? An idea you've wanted to create but haven't yet actualized?

SJ: Yes I am always looking for that hat around the corner.

Culture

A Manifesto on Love

I am deeply interested in love beyond romance. For love exists as friendship, collaboration, chosen family, and creative partnership. The intimacy that develops when people build a shared language over the years. It is through growth and change that allows people to return to one another, or stand by each other’s side, through all of the different stages of their lives.

My favorite subjects to photograph are people who surrender to the image. They allow themselves to be liberated. In a willingness to clown around lies a seductive vulnerability that emerges from the unthinkable. Through photography, I want to challenge the narrow ideas of beauty and allow people to be embodied. Presence is all that we have and it needs to be celebrated.

And then there is the studio itself, which becomes an act of love: a space where people can feel unguarded enough to reveal themselves. We are protected from the outside world, even as we spill out of the bounds of the studio walls. Four walls cannot contain all of the spirit generated by being uninhibited by the streets or by nature. It is where spontaneity exists to build a container of trust.

Love is unruly. It is a messy contradiction full of softness and sabotage, lust and loyalty, devotion and devastation. All because it is wholly alive. We have to choose to create anyway. Choose to celebrate bodies anyway. Choose intimacy anyway. Choose play anyway. Without this, how would we create, transform, or exist together?

Culture

If You Don’t Know How to Love, at Least Learn How to Fuck

Who do we think we are? What makes me think I should be privy to advising others as to how to do anything, let alone undergo a venture as extravagant and odious as throwing a penthouse party in a city I don’t live in in mid-July? Our previous accolades consist of:

FW SS 2025: The one that started it all. Spontaneous, impulsive thought experiment of the party. First edition of the Chelsea. Competition against Fashion Week. Beat them. Run up 4,000 k tab. Porn on the TV. Porn in the rokom. Chicken nuggets with caviar. Ted Skata mentions he ordered 7 ice creams and proceeded to let them melt all over the sticky velvet living room. The image is disgusting, and I ask no further. Three music videos filmed. One with Andi Vaus, one with Dimond, and the third, as the boys recall, was but a man with a camera who recorded whatever it is that his footage entails.

Halloween. A retired MMA fighter wrestling an 18-year-old nepo baby on the floor of someone's apartment, for reasons nobody present can later reconstruct or agree on. The one that got announced 45 minutes beforehand.

Valentine’s Day: Francis Delacroix’s book launch. It lasted as long as it took to conjure it. People were trying to book the Ritz from the street outside. Unsuccessful. Moved to the Mercer. Security footage exists of at least one person being blocked from entering their own party.

New York has no single etiquette for entertaining. The city's best parties happen in railroad apartments, gallery back rooms, Chinatown restaurants, borrowed rooftops, and living rooms where half the guests barely fit. They are held together less by perfection than by momentum, good casting, and the feeling that everyone is exactly where they're supposed to be.

On July 3, five of us hosted a bottle party in a Manhattan penthouse. Friends arrived carrying whatever they wanted to drink, strangers became regulars by midnight, playlists changed hands as often as bottles did, and the apartment settled into the kind of rhythm that only New York seems capable of producing.

The Method (As It Is)

Step 1: Three martini lunch.

Step 2: Drunk-talk your way into booking the room. At the Chelsea, ideally. This time at NoMo Hotel Soho. You went in for one drink with a friend you haven’t seen in a while. You immeditely Trojan Horsed the idea of a party after hearing about their vivacious life in the city.

Step 3: Make a flier. It’s the next morning. You remember what you’ve done. You need to make a flier: you have learned your lesson of disorganisation last time when you just posted about the event on your close friends’ stories. You’re too hungover to put any actual effort in. Besides, it’s meant to look nonchalant. A handwritten, barely legible note on a hotel’s cocktail napkin, stating a room number and a time by your hands which are still shaking.

Step 4: Post it. Turn your phone off and ignore anyone who actually RSVPs. Make your own mental checklist. It begins and ends with the one person you’re trying to hook up with.

Step 5: Pre-party dinner with co-hosts. You can’t afford it because you just dropped a bag on the hotel room. You’re chain-smoking outside and ducking the waiters trained by American hospitality who desperately want your business. You have nothing to offer them. You have nothing to offer to anyone. You are worthless. You are also wearing a skirt that will pop open if you even think of an appetiser.

Step 6: Arrive in the room. It’s too small. You have been betrayed once more. The balcony is bolted shut so you ask your dodgy friend from Brooklyn to run to his car and unsrew the door.

Step 7: Too many people come. You regret playing God with the guest list. You also never told the hotel reception you planned a party with 1000 people. Not to worry.

Step 8: Cobrasnake pulls up. To worry

Step 9: Booze delivery arrives 2 hours late. Crowd is elated. You drink your weight in booze. Cobra takes an awful photo of you. Baddies are clawing over a White Claw.

Step 10: Have a two-hour conversation with a stranger in the bathroom. This memory only comes back to you when you check the Cobra website the next morning.

Step 11: Get banned for life. Walk out ashamed, escorted by security and sweating vodka and ecstasy as the flash of the camera scorns your eyeballs, unable to hide behind the darkened frame of the too-big-for-your-face sunglasses you have on. Notice the exiting carpet you’re walking on is red. Shrug, order a car, and go home. Do it again in a week. Learn nothing from your mistakes.

Culture

Between Two People

July 27, 2026

For more than a decade, Amsterdam photographer Yaël Temminck has been making black-and-white portraits of people who make culture feel alive in their own way. His first monograph, Yaël Temminck (Anthology), brings more than 120 of them together.

There are familiar faces throughout: Werner Herzog, Nan Goldin, Frost Children, John Cale, Peter Doherty, The Dare and Stefano Pilatti among them. But the names are almost beside the point. What matters is the moment the public image slips. Yaël Temminck’s photographs have the feeling of something happening between two people rather than in front of a camera.

Published by Veins Books in an edition of 200 hand-numbered copies, Anthology is intimate and personal in a quiet way. It is a record of the people who have shaped Temminck’s world, and of the photographer he became while looking at them.