In Geert Bruloot’s design for the exhibition, the objects -both hats and complete outfits- are presented in and on top of enlarged models of hatboxes, which are precise reproductions of those hatboxes used by Stephen Jones Millinery: hexagons in form, lilac in colour, with silver logos. The giant hats and boxes in the exhibition represent the importance of playing with proportions in Jones’s work. These boxes were produced in collaboration with the Flemish company Europal Packaging.

In this series, we highlight a visitor of the MoMu Library doing research in our archives.

Name: Yoko Hanegreefs
Nationality: Belgian
Occupation: First Year student

Who are you and what is your research about?
I am a first year student of the ‘Conservation and Restoration of Textile’ course at the Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. I am currently doing research for an assignment about embroidery. As we have to focus on one technique, I am particularly researching crewel embroidery. We are required to write a report about the history and technique itself and make an embroidery piece applying that same technique.

Crewel is an embroidery technique that originated in England and it was later introduced to America. It is a technique of woolen thread on very fine linen and it can be recognized by typical motifs of animals, birds, flowers and leaves. These designs were mostly embroidered on the upholstery of furniture, curtains, clothing, etc. The different colours of threads combined, gradually blend in within a part of the design, therefore making the crewel embroidery look unique.

What brings you to our library?
While I was studying art history at the K.U. Leuven, I was required to take on an internship. They advised us to choose an internship at an ‘institution’ that was related somehow to the subject of my thesis: Dandies. So I chose to do my internship at the MoMu Library, as they own the appropriate material and information for my embroidery assignment. In general, a dandy is known as an English man from the 19th century who would pay a lot of attention to his appearance. A dandy would not really have a job, living the lifestyle of an aristocrat, although most of the time he would not be really an aristocrat. The dandies appeared in the early 19th century and have evolved over the time. Nowadays it is still a broadly known term. The best-known 19th century dandies are Beau Brummell and Oscar Wilde.

Did you find the publications you were looking for?
I did not really have a specific bibliography with me when I first went to the MoMu library to work on my assignment. So it is not about whether I found the resources, it is more about finding the appropriate information on the subject. Although I found a lot of information in some areas, it would have been better to have some more specific information. But overall I did find what I was looking for.

The books that I used the most were; ‘A History of Western Embroidery’ by Mary Eirwen Jones (1969), ‘The Art of Crewel Embroidery’ by Mildred J. Davis (1962), ‘Crewel Embroidery in England’ by Joan Edwards (1975), etc.

What is the next step in you research?
I now need to gather all my findings, historical and technical aspects of the crewel embroidery, into a document. So there is not really that much more research to be done. After I produce this document, the practical part of the assignment will take place, which is to make a piece of crewel embroidery.

What is it that you really like about the MoMu Library?
If I have to name one thing that I really like about the library, it has to be the service. I have visited my share of libraries and this one really stands out. The environment and atmosphere is great. Birgit and Lutgart are incredibly helpful, which makes the library an enjoyment to visit.

On Tuesday November 30th, Stephen Jones will be taking up residency at the Mayfair Live Studio, creating a unique piece for the SHOWstudio Shop’s latest exhibition ‘Florist’. In a series of live streamed performances, a cluth of eminent industry figures will be joining the Live Studio, crafting floral-themed works in tandem with the exhibition and celebrating SHOWstudio.com’s ten year anniversary.

Showcasing the entire process in a live stream for one day only, Jones’s floral artefact will then be exhibited and available for sale. Stephen Jones will be live from 10AM GMT at http://showstudio.com/project/livestudio

If you haven’t done so, be sure to check out this SHOWstudio interview with Stephen Jones!

On Saturday December 11th, MoMu will host a unique masterclass with the British milliner Stephen Jones.

In the morning Jones will present us with an insight into the process of his design, with previews from his upcoming Summer and Winter collections. Participants will have the opportunity to discover and explore Stephen Jones’ inspirations, images and sketches of his new collections. In the afternoon, Stephen Jones will demonstrate the process making of a hat together with an assistant from his atelier: from the miniature-toile, to the real size toile and the final hat piece.

MoMu offers the chance to see the master at work and to gain an overview of the extraordinary craftsmanship of this British milliner. Participants will be able to ask questions to the milliner after the workshop.

Stephen Jones Masterclass
Saturday December 11th, 10AM-5PM
Language: English / Price: €180
Registration mandatory, limited capacity.
E: frieda.debooser@momu.be T: +32 3 470 27 74

Photo© Justine Photography

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« Manières Noires in Mons
Exhibitions
Sainte Catherine, a celebration of fashion, hats and young girls

Stephen Jones & The Accent of Fashion features various silhouettes by different designers, for instance, the enormous yellow and green tule ‘Catherinette’ dress from Christian Dior Haute Couture A/W 2005-06, accessorized with a very festive sequined embroidered hat by Stephen Jones. This silhouette is inspired by an old French tradition, the ‘fête des Catherinettes’, in which unmarried young women from the age of 25, are celebrated on Saint Catherine’s day, when they get to wear a festive green-and-yellow dress and hat to go to the ball.

The French ‘Catherinettes Day’, on November 25th, is the day of the holy Catherine (Sainte Catherine), who is the patron of young unmarried girls, milliners and couturiers. The story to this custom is a little sad: young Catherine of Alexandria, did not want to marry the Emperor, as a result she was beheaded on November 25th, 307. To honour Sainte Catherine’s day, and to find a husband eventually, unmarried girls would have worn bright colours. Although it is very usual these days not to be married at 25, many French designers and milliners still celebrate the Catherinettes in their respective maisons, especially at Dior, since Christian Dior himself had great sympathy for his own Catherinettes. A few pictures still survive from 1953, by the famous photographer Robert Doisneau, of Monsieur Dior with his Catherinettes jumping out of a giant hat box.

Hence, it is no wonder that Stephen Jones and Maison Dior still work together every year to produce a few celebratory outfits in yellow – for succes – and green – for hope – for this special occasion. Sometimes, the outfits are shown on the catwalk as an introduction to the A/W Haute- Couture shows, such as in the video above.

As you may see in the exhibition, the Catherinette silhouette is a good crystallisation of a successful collaboration between Stephen Jones and John Galliano for Dior Haute Couture: it is high fashion, festive, and fun, as well as it features an extraordinary hat!

MoMu participated in the exhibition ‘Manières Noires’ that is currently on view at BAM, the Museum of Fine Arts in Mons. The exhibition focuses on the fascination with the colour black in plastic arts, photography, cinema, design and fashion of the 20th and 21st century.

MoMu has selected a series of 45 items from its collection which are on view in a special room dedicated to the relation between black and the fashion world, covering mainly the 20th century including an embroidered silk dress of around 1910, a simple but stylish satin dress of the twenties, two tastefull looks of the sixties, and an interesting selection of contemporary Belgian designers such as Ann Demeulemeester, Martin Margiela, Bruno Pieters and Dirk Van Saene.

Manières Noires at BAM
Until February 13th 2011
www.bam-mons.be

Glamour, the final theme of Stephen Jones & The Accent of Fashion, is introduced by a blown-up version of ‘Ecstasy’, one of the hats inspired by the film ‘The Red Shoes’. Glamour is about divas, among other things, resulting in a whole array of top hats in varying proportions. Glamour moreover evokes sex, parties, boudoir and spotlights.

Some collections are motivated by films and Jones will base hats on key scenes; for example, his ‘Artifice’ collection (Spring/Summer 2007) parallels the story line of ‘The Red Shoes’, a 1948 British dance film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The film is constructed according to the principle of ‘a tale within a tale’, and introduces a young ballerina – played by the famous redheaded dancer Moira Shearer – who is forced by an unscrupulous impresario to choose between her art – dance – and love. ‘Ecstacy’, a distorted mask, is adorned with a photograph, a still shot of Shearer’s penetrating expression when she is in the delirium and passion of the ballet.

© Photography: Frederik Vercruysse

As you’ll know by now, Stephen Jones & The Accent of Fashion is built around four themes, each introduced by an enlargement of a hat. The ‘Rococo’ theme is introduced by an enlarged version of ‘Damn That Feels Good!’ (Autumn/Winter 1999-2000), an asymmetrical hat decorated with an arch-shaped structure of jumbled wood and twigs. The cap, to which the structure is attached, is made from hatter’s plush, a silk material traditionally used by hat makers for bowler hats. Jones acquired this specific hatter’s plush following bankruptcy of the firm Rayne, which had been a supplier to the Britsh royal family. The hat’s name is a play of words since the hat’s shape is reminiscent of a beaver dam.

In Jones’s view, rococo is a more lyrical, more charming and more individual style than baroque and is largely concerned with the asymmetry in nature. Leaf and flower motifs are plentiful in Jones’s work, and here and there nature is even literally his matière première.

Rei Kawakubo, of the Japanese label Comme des Garçons, and Vivienne Westwood are the two designers represented in this theme. The work of each, in its own way, rebels against the rule of symmetry as an established aesthetic value in form and in culture.

In a previous post, we looked at an enlargement of the ‘London’ hat from Jones’s Travelogue collection which introduces the first theme of the exhibition. The second theme, Science, explores Jones’s fascination for what he calls the space age and his predilection for science and technology, subjects he already excelled in as a youngster at school. For Jones, science is also about shapes and volumes, barying from a simple line to complex cell structures.

“I am a typical product of my generation. I’m a child of the 1960s. I always wanted to be a spaceman. The space race was on television and exciting. That was the new world. That was the future. People really did talk about the future. At school I was good in a weird mixture of things. I was really good at physics, my favourite subject, and art. The more esoteric and complex it is, the more I love it. And actually that is what I do. It is all about building a bridge. It is about physics. It’s about imagining a volume, or a tension, or a colour and making it reality.”

The hat that introduces this theme is an enlargement of Soho, a classic trilby made of shiny vacuum-formed polyethylene, from Jones’s Millinery Computer collection. Soho a true classic in his oeuvre and its shape has since been reintroduced in various later collections. Jones believes it is an exceptionally pure form, in which he tried to reduce the form to its essence, so that it looks like a sketch for a hat.

The designers represented in this group include Claude Montana and Azzedine Alaïa, who share Jones’s love for form and tailoring, as well as Giles and Walter Van Beirendonck, who, like Jones, cherish a fascination for technology. This subgroup looks more closely at highly diverse forms, volumes and graphic patterns, beginning with the purest of all forms: the line.

Stephen Jones & The Accent of Fashion is built around four themes: Adventure, Rococo, Science and Glamour. In Geert Bruloot’s design for the exhibition, each theme is introduced by an enlargement of a hat. Each of the four themes in the exhibition can be read as a story in its own right, with individual chapters or subthemes. This way, MoMu has tried to translate the strong narrative character of Jones’s oeuvre into the exhibition concept. Jones has detailed narratives to accompany many of his hats, populated with fictional characters who bring the hats to life.

The first theme is introduced by an enlarged version of London from Jones’ s Travelogue collection. The design for this hat was inspired by the film adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days, in which the protagonist, Phileas Fogg, begins his voyage around the globe from a phone box in London. This top hat is decorated on the back with three photographic panels of passport pages. The pages were photographed from Jones’s own passport and show visas for the United States, Japan and Israel. The hat’s front bears a coat of arms with the Latin text ex corona ad astra (from the crown to the stars) and the heraldic figures of an owl and a rabbit, references to materials often used in making hats, such as bird feathers and rabbit fur that is processed into felt. The crest moreover features Jones’s own initials, together with a needle, a thimble and a wooden hat mould.

On October 13th until 15th, the ‘Camouflage Takes Centre Stage’ symposium took place at the Royal Military Academy in Brussels: a three day conference about camouflage, with researchers from many different disciplines. The event was organised by Ilse Bogaerts, costume conservator at the Royal Army Museum.

On Friday Oct 15th, the program was particularly interesting to the fashion crowd, as Patricia Mears (FIT), Sarah Scaturro (Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian) and Karen van Godtsenhoven (MoMu) all gave their specific interpretations of camouflage in fashion. In addition, Griet Kockeltoren (former MoMu member of staff, now independent conservation consultant) opened an interesting debate about the advantages, but also on the damage that some conservation methods can cause.

The day was a mixture of fashion history and textile conservation lectures, mixed with art talks (by Davide Fornari and Laurence Graffin-Vene), as well as very scientific and military talks about different types of camouflage, nanotechnology and the future of camouflage. The highlight of Friday afternoon was the sniper demonstration by Belgian Captain Bryan Decoux, who made the attendees wear binoculars, giving them tips to locate the sniper in their surroundings, until… BANG BANG!! A few bullets went off, but no one could locate the sniper even with the very strong binoculars.

A great demonstration of how good urban camouflage can work, now that the battlefield is so often the city rather than the great wide open. The day ended with a lot of socializing between the fashion and military crowds, with the exchange of some Belgian camouflaged military uniforms for a few admiring smiles as the cherry on the cake.

Proceedings from the conference will be published later this year at http://www.klm-mra.be

In collaboration with Stephen Jones and the Fashion Museum, Belgian chocolatier Dominique Persoone developed four chocolate truffles in the form of tiny hats from Stephen Jones’ collection. Take delight in this exceptional merging of form and taste!

LONDON – S/S 2006 “Travelogue”-collection
This top hat of dark blue artificial straw is decorated on the back with three photographic panels of passport pages.The design for this hat was inspired by the film adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’, in which the protagonist, Phileas Fogg, begins his voyage around the globe form a phone box in London.
Dominique Persoone presents: A bitter chocolate ganache with peat whisky and a soft milk chocolate ganache of hunter’s herbal tea.

SOHO – A/W 1998-1999 “Millinery Computer”-collection
Soho, a classic trilby made of shiny vacuum-formed polyethylene, is a true classic in Stephen Jones’s oeuvre. Jones believes it is an exceptionally pure form that came about from trying to reduce the hat to its essence, to just the initial sketch.
Dominique Persoone presents: A caramel of rice vinegar and soy sauce, an almond and sesame praliné with crackling sugar and “Sancho” pepper.

DAMN THAT FEELS GOOD! – S/S 1998 “PIC’N’MIX”-collection
Damn That Feels Good! is an asymmetrical hat decorated with an archshaped structure of jumbled wood and twigs. The cap to which the structure is attached, is made from hatter’s plush, a silk material traditionally used by hat makers for bowler hats. The hat’s name is a play on words since the hat’s shape is reminiscent of a beaver dam.
Dominique Persoone presents: A white chocolate mousse flavoured with spring grass juice, rolled in roasted almond bars.

ECSTASY – S/S 2007 “ARTIFICE”-collection
Ecstasy is inspired by ‘The Red Shoes’, a 1984 British dance film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and introduces a young ballerina – played by the famous redheaded dancer Moira Shearer. Ecstasy, a tiara with a bow, is adorned with a photograph of Shearer’s penetrating expression when her impressario tells her character that he will make her a star.
Dominique Persoone presents: A crunchy hazelnut praliné flavoured with purple violets.

The collection chocolates by Dominique Persoone, Shock-O-Latier for Stephen Jones Millinery will be sold in a specially designed hatbox for €20,00 at The Chocolate Line Bruges & Antwerp and at the reception of the MoMu Fashion Museum Antwerp.