Wendy Fraser, volunteer at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery and MA History of Design and Material Culture student, shares her insider insights on an innovative new display at the Royal Pavilion.

Stephen Jones Hats, the exhibition at the Royal Pavilion that opened on 7 February 2019 and runs until 9 June 2019, celebrates over 150 hat creations designed by the milliner Stephen Jones OBE. After studying millinery at Central St Martins (and being taught dress history by University of Brighton’s Professor Lou Taylor), Jones opened his first shop in Covent Garden in 1980 and just two years later one of his hats was bought by the V&A for their collection. He has designed hats for celebrities and royalty and has collaborated with fashion houses and couturiers including Dior, Thom Browne and Giles Deacon. The hats in the exhibition have been garnered from private lenders, designers and Jones’s own archive.

Figure 1 3D printed bust of Stephen Jones wearing a specially made top hat in the Octagon Hall of the Pavilion. Photograph by Tessa Hallman, 2019. Image courtesy of Brighton Museum.

Co-curated by Stephen Jones and Martin Pel, the curator of Fashion and Textiles at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, the exhibition has been designed as a tour through the Royal Pavilion with the hats, grouped by theme, ‘peopling’ the rooms. The visitor is greeted in the Octagon Hall by two gilded busts of George IV and Stephen Jones commissioned especially for the exhibition and wearing oversized hats: a velvet bicorne hat from Galliano’s Spring/Summer 2009 show for the Prince Regent and a crimson velvet top hat upon Jones’s head (Figure 1). Jones has made headwear for George IV before: his statue in Trafalgar Square was adorned with a gold hat in the shape of one of the Pavilion’s domes and topped with a rounded minaret (the hat is displayed on the bed in the Yellow Bow Room) while the horse he sat astride sported a smaller version. Both hats were designed for  the millinery showcase Hatwalk when some of London’s most famous statues were behatted as part of the celebrations for the London Olympics in 2012.

The Pavilion provides a fitting background for Jones’s hats which are as dramatic and fantastical as the opulent interiors of the royal palace.  Jones has links to Brighton; his Spring/Summer 2012 collection Chinoiserie-on-Sea was inspired by the Pavilion and he has carried out research for his work in the costume store at Brighton Museum which is where the idea for this exhibition was first proposed. It is this collection of Brighton-themed hats, connecting to the architecture and seaside location of the city, which visitors first encounter in the entrance hall.

Figure 2 Stephen Jones’s hats on display in the Great Kitchen, Brighton Pavilion. Photograph by Tessa Hallman, 2019. Image courtesy of Brighton Museum.

In the banqueting room the table is set for 26 hats worn by some of Jones’s most famous clients including Lady Gaga, Mick Jagger, Kylie Minogue and Boy George. The two wider, most prestigious chairs at the star-studded dinner party are reserved for a top hat from the 1920s which belonged to Jones’s grandfather and a hat that he has replicated for George IV from a portrait painted in 1782, demonstrating that hats have always been ‘an important social and historical item of dress.’ [1] The great kitchen has a whimsical display of hats themed around food, the underwater world and birds (Figure 2). A seagull hat designed for the New York brand, Thom Browne, is displayed high up in the kitchen as though ready to sweep down and steal chips – a witty nod to Brighton’s beach menaces.

I have been volunteering at the museum with Martin Pel since Autumn 2017 and have been involved in the behind-the-scenes preparation for the show. It’s been a fascinating experience, and has included visiting the studio of Zenzie Tinker Textile Conservation (where individual mounts have been made for each hat to enable their display on metal stands) and helping to measuring the heights for the hat stands in their different display configurations. I assisted on a shoot where each hat was individually photographed for the guide panels, I met the artist who has gilded the 3D printed busts in her studio, and when it came to the installation of the exhibition, I helped to put hats into their locations. There are entire outfits by Giles Deacon, Thom Browne, John Galliano for Dior and Maria Grazia Chiuri for Dior on display, with the hats that Jones made to accessorise them.  During the installation a team from Dior came to the Pavilion to dress the Dior mannequins but I was able to assist by dressing some of the mannequins with the Giles Deacon outfits and moving them into position with Martin (Figure 3). This was thrilling but also quite nerve-wracking!

Figure 3 Giles Deacon outfits with Stephen Jones runway headpieces. Photograph by Tessa Hallman, 2019. Image courtesy of Brighton Museum.

During his speech at the private view, Jones spoke about the exhibition and observed that ‘hats tell a story’. The hats worn by the glitterati of our times exhibited in the Royal Pavilion help to remind the visitor that the Pavilion was a pleasure palace – a venue for lively parties attended by glamorous aristocratic guests. The interaction between the hats and the architecture and furnishings of the Pavilion allows the hats to transcend their function as headwear. Depending on where they are positioned, they appear as sculptural objects of art in their own right, at times complimenting the colours and style of the sumptuous interiors, at others arresting the eye with their incongruous shapes and materials. Clair Hughes describes the wild nature of millinery in a way that surely the hedonistic George IV would approve of: ‘a hat has the license to be what it wants’, she writes, ‘it can take off in any direction in almost any material and much can happen as it leaps into the void. Hats, like the best pleasures, are risky.’ [2]

[1] Oriole Cullen, Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones, (London: V&A Publishing, 2009) 11.

[2] Clair Hughes, Hats (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) 14.

Triin Jerlei, a postdoctoral researcher at Vilnius University, Lithuania, and graduate of University of Brighton, shares her new research project in the history of design. 

I received my doctorate from Brighton University in 2016, following my MA in History and Design and Culture, for research on Soviet Estonian industrial designers from the 1960s until the 1980s. Until recently most of my research focused on Estonian local design under the Soviet power as a case study in the development of a ‘Western Soviet’ design system. However, in my research I noticed that too often I was comparing Soviet Estonian regional design systems and processes with those taking place in capitalist countries or in Moscow as the ‘centre’, instead of other so-called ‘peripheral’ Soviet states. Therefore it became my dream to conduct a transnational comparative study between the design systems of two former Soviet states.

In general there is not a lot of research on Soviet design systems, especially in the late Socialist period. While Stalinism and the Thaw are easier to define both in their political tendencies and their chronological span, Late Socialism, often also called Stagnation, is a complex era characterized by different processes of globalization and regionalization throughout the vast Soviet Union. As remaining isolated was not sustainable, foreign trade and tourists played an increasing role in the economy, facilitating  the spread of global trends especially in the Western Soviet regions. A complex combination of various political, economical and cultural processes shaped the development of regional design cultures, which is the topic of my research.

The delivery of a transnational project on the history of several former Soviet republics was complicated by political factors, as archives are not fully accessible in many former Asian Soviet republics. Additionally it was important that I could read the local language relatively quickly, which is easiest with a language that uses Latin script. For these reasons I chose Lithuania as my second country of comparison and I decided to focus on the construction known as ‘Baltic design’. While Estonia and Lithuania were similarly situated on the Western border of the Soviet Union and had close historical and cultural connections, there are still significant differences between the two countries, which this research will clarify to provide a better understanding of the interrelations between different ‘peripheries’.

I was incredibly lucky to receive funding from the Lithuanian Council of Sciences. Thanks for this, I have been able to take up a two-year postdoctoral position at the Kaunas faculty of Vilnius University, supervised by Professor Virginija Jurėnienė. The decision to move to Lithuania instead of working in Estonia was deliberate, not only to learn about the history of Lithuanian design, but also to understand its present state and its situation in the wider culture. Additionally it has been exciting to get to know a new local research environment and to discover more about the general cultural scene.

So far, I have discovered that in spite of close connections between the Baltic states in the Soviet Union, the design systems differ in some key aspects. These variations are largely caused by differences in local design traditions. A good illustration is souvenir production. Both countries used wood as a locally available material, but where Estonian souvenirs were often useful objects (or replicas of objects that had once served a function), in Lithuania one finds numerous small wooden figurines, often based on folklore. This difference between minimalism in Estonia and rich ornament in Lithuania can also be seen in other fields of design. In terms of the organization of design systems, the design institutions of the two states were connected and cooperated closely, but had different structures.

I hope that this research will contribute to global design history by diversifying the understanding of different local stories of design. The ‘mundane’ fields of design and the systems behind everyday material culture are often at risk of being forgotten. One of the most exciting aspects of working with the materials from the 1970s and 1980s has been the role that these objects still play in living memories and environments, thanks to their ordinariness and ubiquity.

P.S. As a part of my Fellowship I am organizing a symposium in Kaunas, on the subject of design and creative economies. Details can be found here: http://www.knf.vu.lt/en/making-and-shaping-things-in-creative-economies