My kingdom for a hat!

13th May 2009 by Violette

After reading a blogpost written by NoCrowds, one of the This is Now Twitter followers, I decided to head off to the Victoria and Albert Museum (the V&A) to visit the Hats exhibition.

Hats: An anthology by Stephen Jones is an hommage to the V&A’s very first fashion exhibition which took place in the early 70’s: Fashion: An Anthology by Cecil Beaton. It put fashion on the museum map: ever since, it has become a very important part of the season programme at the V&A and in other museums all over Europe. For example a few years later, the Museum of Fashion opened in Paris to collect and display creations that have marked the development of historical and contemporary fashion and has been showing major fashion exhibitions ever since.

This year the V&A has invited famous milliner Stephen Jones to curate an exhibition around what has been dubed the ultimate fashion accessory: the hat.

The magical and Baroque garden setting of the exhibition displays historical hats from all around the world as well as some of Stephen Jones’ own creations for prominent fashion designers (like Vivienne Westwood, Christian Dior, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Marc Jacobs and Comme des Garçons…). It creates astonishing parallels between eras, materials and style and helps us understand the importance of hats throughout history.

The exhibition is briliantly organised so that hats aficionados and newbies alike can appreciate the beauty of hats (whether it is about making them, wearing them or just admiring them from afar). It was even more interesting for me that hats were not a topic of fashion I was particularly fluent in before visiting the exhibition. Even though everyday fashion has somewhat forgotten about the delicious art of hats, I have to say that the exhibition showed me that it was very much ‘now’. And since my visit it seems that I’ve been seeing hats everywhere, in every shops windows, at work and in the streets.

To conclude, if I had one piece of advice it would be to hurry up and to do whatever it takes to get to the V&A before the exhibition closes down on the 31st of May. You really won’t regret it.

In-between make sure you visit the Hats Off page if you want to know more about Hats: an anthology: several films, a 360° panoramic tour of the exhibition as well as drawings, photographs and interviews will give you all the behind-the-scenes informations you need to know.

tagged Dior fashion Marc Jacobs millinery Stephen Jones this is now V&A