The Art of Millinery with Stephen Jones

Name: The Art of Millinery with Stephen Jones
Start: 2025-12-08T08:30:00+11:00
End: 2025-12-08T09:30:00+11:00
Location: NGV International

Schedule

Mon Dec 08 2025 at 08:30 am to 09:30 am

UTC+11:00

Location

NGV International | Melbourne, VI

THE ART OF MILLINERY WITH STEPHEN JONES

🎩 British milliner Stephen Jones joins us in Melbourne for a conversation with NGV Senior Curator of Fashion and Textiles, Katie Somerville.
Reflecting on his four-decade career, Jones will share insights into his creative and collaborative process with iconic designers including Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo.
Providing a rare opportunity to hear from Jones, the conversation will explore the art of millinery and it’s evolution, and exhibition work with museums and galleries around the world– including, most recently, working with the NGV on Westwood | Kawakubo.

📍 Clemenger Auditorium, NGV International
🗓️ Monday 8 December
⏰ 6:30 – 7:30pm
🎥 This event is also available to attend via livestream.

🎟️ BOOK NOW. https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/program/the-art-of-millinery-with-stephen-jones/?utm_medium=advertising&utm_source=self+serve+meta&utm_campaign=programs&utm_content=standard&utm_term=awareness

🎩 ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Stephen Jones burst on to the London fashion scene during its explosion of street style in the late seventies. By day, he was a student at St Martins; after dark he was one of that era’s uncompromising style-blazers at the legendary Blitz nightclub – always crowned with a striking hat of his own idiosyncratic design. In 1980, Jones opened his first millinery salon in the heart of London’s Covent Garden. In 2009 at the Victoria and Albert Museum, he curated the hugely popular exhibition Hats, an Anthology by Stephen Jones. Since the early eighties Stephen Jones has collaborated with designers from Jean Paul Gaultier, Rei Kawakubo and Claude Montana through to his current work with Thom Browne Schiaparelli and Christian Dior. Jones’ hats have been an integral component in some of the most memorable runway spectacles of the past quarter century.
Katie Somerville is Senior Curator, Fashion and Textiles, at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). She has worked with a range of fashion and textiles collections for more than three decades, including at the National Gallery of Australia and Historic Houses Trust of NSW. She joined the curatorial department at the NGV in 1995, working with both the Australian and international collections. She currently manages the research and development of the collection and the ongoing program of publications and exhibitions for the Fashion and Textiles Department. During her time at the NGV she has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions including Martin Grant, (2025), Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse (2022), The House of Dior: Seventy Years of Haute Couture (2017), Making the Australian Quilt: 1800–1950 (2016), Express Yourself: Romance Was Born for Kids (2014–15), Together Alone: Australian and New Zealand Fashion (2009) and Akira Isogawa: Printemps-Été (2004–05).

🧷 ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Westwood | Kawakubo pairs the work of two of the most influential fashion designers in recent history, Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons. Showcasing over140 designs, the exhibition highlights the convergences and divergences between the two designers’ work.
Beginning their careers in the 1970s working in different countries and cultural contexts, British-born Vivienne Westwood (1941–2022), and Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo (b.1942), introduced a rule-breaking radicalism to fashion by subverting the status quo. As self-taught, independent practitioners, Westwood and Kawakubo’s affinity lies in their uncompromising originality anchored in a desire for personal freedom, autonomy, and social and aesthetic change. Their unorthodox approaches have similarly questioned conventions of taste, gender and beauty, the body, and garment form and function to change how we think about fashion.