Antwerp’s MoMu fashion museum opened its doors on Tuesday evening for the latest exhibition for Fall Winter 2010-11, in a retrospective of the 30 year career of British hat designer Stephen Jones. Having collaborated with the world’s most distinguished fashion designers, Stephen’s hats have become synonymous with a quirky and glamorous aesthetic – the finishing artistic touch to many fabulous and memorable outfits.

Collectors’ Geert Bruloot and Eddy Michiels of Coccodrillo boutique in Antwerp have offered their extensive personal hat collection to the exhibition, alongside pieces directly from the archives of Azzedine Alaïa, Jean Paul Gaultier, Comme des Garçons, Vivienne Westwood and John Galliano. Not only offering their hats, Geert himself has co-curated the exhibition with the MoMu’s Kaat Debo, engineering a four part journey through Stephen’s fantastical realms – beginning with “Adventure”, “Science”, “Rococo” and finishing with “Glamour”.

The exhibition’s layout is anything but spare – a surprise considering the focus is a rather petite object designed to perch atop the human head. Instead the space is filled with giant white hat boxes emblazoned with Stephen’s logo, and each section is punctuated with a giant recreation of one of his designs. At the pinnacle room of the museum, a starry night sky is a sweeping curved backdrop to a tribute to Stephen’s long collaboration with Walter Van Beirendonck, with a group of nine mannequins displaying some of their most outrageous and futuristic creations.

Rounding out the hats themselves are many iconic photographs from the pages of international fashion titles – from Stephen’s hometown of London to one of his most popular fashion markets of Tokyo, Japan. Upon entering the exhibition, visitors can view a video of Stephen’s earliest days in the business, dressing his ‘New Romantic’ friends like singer Boy George and model Sybille de St Phalle. Italian Vogue’s Anna Piaggi, another close friend, dedicated a collage to Stephen featuring images of her own extensive collection, shot inside her Milan apartment.

Complementary to the exhibition MoMu has published “Stephen Jones & The Accent of Fashion” as a hardcover book in conjunction with Lannoo publishers – a 250-page tome with literary contributions by John Galliano, Suzy Menkes, and Anna Piaggi. For a sweet escape, Brugges’ based chocolatier Dominique Persoone has concocted an exclusive selection of four chocolates inspired by Stephen Jones’ millinery. Both the book and the boxed chocolates are available for sale in the MoMu.

From his punk beginnings in the clubland of 80s London to the forefront of Parisian couture, the exhibition is truly a triumphant celebration of Stephen’s larger-than-life persona, reflected in over 300 of his exquisitely delicate objets d’art.

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An excerpt from the foreword by John Galliano:

“Over the years, Stephen and I have created an astonishing range of hats and developed a creative shorthand, and friendship, that is built on trust and mutual admiration. The complement between fashion and accessory is seen time and time again in my collections on the runway. Hats are as important as a great shoe or bag, and for each collection the partnership between elements must be fresh, new and always relevant to the spirit I am creating. I don’t want any hat – I want the right hat. In fittings our creative conversation explores all the options until we select the winning style. Stephen never gives up. He knows how to create a Galliano hat or a Dior hat and make it the perfect hat – that is what is important and sets him apart.

A hat can be a veil or an alibi, a head turner or a friend. It can give clues, or, like this foreword, serve as the introduction to all the wonder that lies within. Enjoy!”

- John Galliano

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Above image: Photograph by Sølve Sundsbø.

Above: A fishbone fascinator by Stephen Jones from the ‘Adventure’ series.

Above: A beaded evening dress by Azzedine Alaïa with headscarf by Stephen Jones.

Above: A selection of hats in the “Glamour” series, by Stephen Jones”.

Cathy Horyn is fashion critic for The New York Times, and in 2001 for Hussein Chalayan’s NºC she offered this philosophical look at the dynamic and often superficial world of high fashion.

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Does the runway lie? I mean, can you really absorb enough information from a 15-minute runway presentation to know if a designer has done the big job or is merely show-boating? And then what becomes of that visual impression when it’s bombarded with successive images that are unrelated? Does it pound everything into a kind of mental mush that absolves us of needing to care or feel about anything?

My friend and whirling colleague (the late) Amy Spindler, style editor of The New York Times Magazine, will often say, as she is exiting a plainly bad show, ‘The runway never lies!’. To her, and perhaps to most of us who look at clothes for a living, you can tell rather quickly if a designer has something new or worthwhile to say. But I’ve been wrong. I’ve been hoodwinked by collections that seemed ingenious (Romeo Gigli’s Paris show in the early 90′s when he draped his clothes with Murano glass) and dismisive of others that in retrospect were actually speaking to our democratic times (the last show of Miguel Adrover before his dopey backers pulled the plug).

In fact, the modern runway is a lie. It has allowed very average designers with a powerful tabloid sense of communication to be perceived as great talents. It plays tricks on your senses – senses, of course, that have been radically altered by a culture that demands sound bytes and seems to be in constant fear of boredom. I don’t blame someone like Tom Ford for knowing how to seduce people with his fashion shows – the always dark room, the music and atmosphere always reminiscent of another, freer time in fashion. He is as agile as he is succinct. But I suppose I blame the audiences for not looking deeper, and for not expecting more.

I don’t have a great yen for the past, but I have plenty of curiosity, and I have often wondered what it would have been like to go to a Balenciaga show and sit there through 200 passages as Diana Vreeland and Carmel Snow smoked in the front row. And what did it sound like when Carmel, alone among the editors, clapped at the show that signaled Chanel’s return? The salon, the silence, the rapt attention of the audience – this is not a wish for the good-old days. But think about what it must have meant to sit there and absorb clothes at eye level. Balenciaga wasn’t just interested in putting across looks that spanned the day of his clients; he was also determined to reveal the intimacies of a craft. And I am reminded, too, that at one of the lowest points in Yves Saint Laurent’s life, in 1976, he produced one of this most exhilarating collections: a ready-to-wear show, based on Carmen, that had 300 looks and ran for three hours.
‘You can’t believe how exciting that show was,’ Thadee Klossowski, who is married to LouLou de la Falaise, told me. ‘I watched it twice’. At the end of one of Saint Laurent’s last couture shows, with 90-some looks, I remember an American editor saying as she stood to leave, ‘God, he should be paying us to sit through that.’ Time, and the spontaneity of visual communication, is what has made fashion seem irrelevant.

I have, like many people, a ready suspicion that most of what we see on the television news is only half the truth, or at least half the story. (The one obvious exception is September 11, when the media, and hundreds of amateur photographers, reported the events as they were happening before everyone’s eyes, in real time.) We expect the news to come to us immediately, that’s what the media brightly promises, after all – but the meaning of those events dissapates as quickly as a summer rain. And then it’s on to the next injustice or report of catastrophe. What this creates, it seems to me, is an illusion of involvement, even empathy, without the need to react. It’s your surface involvement that sustains you, maybe because you sense the real story is too complicated, and too horrific, to try to fathom.

We heard a lot in the 90′s, as designers bandied about words like ‘marketing’ and ‘branding’, that fashion was about surface. It was supposed to be fun and quick and – deeply? – of the moment. At the same time, designers took on more – more collections, more roles – and this elaborate plate spinning was supposed to impress the public. You also got the idea, as a rather cynical one, that nothing was meant to last in the new fashion era, and therefore you weren’t expected to judge anything too harshly.

What we’ve found out, of course, is that most designers don’t have the mental agility (or the discipline) of someone like Karl Lagerfeld to do more than one thing well. And what was wrong, anyway, with doing one thing exceptionally well? It’s been said, almost as a defense for their lack of imagination and integrity, that younger designers sample the 70′s and 80′s because they belong to the postmodern age. And how often have journalists airily employed the word ‘referencing’ to describe what, in another era, would be called copying? But the trouble with referencing or postmodernism (as it’s lightly understood these days) is that it discourages people from doing the real mental work that every creative process entails.

Strange as it must seem, the people I admire in fashion are those who have in a way dropped out, or who insist on doing things with a kind of quiet rigor – Azzedine Alaïa, Martin Margiela, Yohji Yamamoto and Jean Paul Gaultier, who, through hardly quiet, has managed to extract more from his aesthetic since going into haute couture. Experience now rules – and what is experience but the slow evolution of time and understanding?

Earlier this year, I came out of the tunnel of working with Bill Blass on his memoir, Bare Blass, and I was wondering if I had spent too much time absorbed in one man’s past to recognise what was happening today. The New York fall collections had just commenced, ans as I went around to the shows, looking at some of the new designers whom people were cooing about, I thought ‘Am I just not seeing what all the fuss is about?’. To me, this new talent seemed so marginal against the life of Blass, whose career began in the late 40′s in the back rooms of Seventh Avenue and took years, years, to really develop.

But I realized my reaction to the runways was based on something more, something personal. Because in the process of shifting from newspaper deadline writing to book writing, I had learned what it means to truly understand a subject. I had to slow down, go more deeply through the layers, and give to everything a perspective longer than six months. It is something you need in this business more than ever.

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Above image: Carmel Snow & Diana Vreeland.

When one steps out of Hasselt train station, it may seem the entire city is alive with ULTRAMEGALORE, the new fashion and art exhibition curated by Belgian model Hannelore Knuts at the Mode Museum in her hometown. A large white billboard of Hannelore in Vogue Paris greets you on the adjacent street, followed by a long procession of yellow flags lining the high street.

Upon entering the museum, Hannelore’s face is no less evident (rather, very much more so) and quite rightly so in a retrospective project such as this, celebrating a decade-long modelling career and a colourful personal journey alongside it.

Hannelore by name, ULTRA-MEGA-LORE by nature.

The 800sqm Mode Museum has had no exercise of minimalism wrought upon it, but an explosion of colour, light, sound and film that overwhelms in its small details and larger visual impact alike. Impossible to describe and document in one story, A BLOG will feature three days of ULTRAMEGALORE, beginning with fashion and running through the art and photography elements, for a holistic view of the entire exhibition.

From the entrance hall and a life-size Hannelore on the cover of Vogue Italia December 2005 to the attic room creaking with mannequins and magazines, Hannelore has unearthed a ten year legacy in the fashion industry with an impressive archive of her personal garments, and couture pieces borrowed from the designers closest to her. From the first garment – a Maison Martin Margiela artisanal leather waistcoat – to the final dress – a Christian Lacroix ceremonial wedding gown – each piece is imbued with a ‘Hannelorian tale’, whether it be a piece she wore in its catwalk debut or something her beauty and charisma inspired as a muse.

Above: Maison Martin Margiela artisanal leather waistcoat.

Above: Christian Lacroix wedding dress as worn by Hannelore.

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With a face that captured the shift in classical beauty and a turn towards more avant-garde models, Hannelore’s fierce lust for life coupled with her dashing looks – a pointed nose, strong chin and big, bright eyes – became an instant hit with a slew of designers across the world. From Belgian designers like Ann Demeulemeester and Dries Van Noten, to Paris stalwarts such as Azzedine Alaïa and Jean Paul Gaultier, Hannelore quickly became a regular fixture on their runways and in their campaigns. With some, Hannelore became more involved than just a model, becoming a muse and even collaborator on projects – particularly with Azzedine Alaïa and Haider Ackermann.

As such her personal style has become an intermingled mix of all these disparate aesthetics, resulting in a fluid femininity that is roughed up with a rock-star edge and a colourful eclecticism. The garments on show are a rare mix of new and old pieces, from established designers to younger names, from New York to Paris and back to Antwerp. The variety and scale is imposing: ranging from piles of designer shoe samples straight off the catwalk, to playful costumes worn by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, fanciful couture looks from Lacroix, eveningwear from Hermès, and t-shirts from Bernhard Willhelm.

Downstairs the fashion is separated into designated rooms (for those designers who Hannelore holds nearest and dearest), and upstairs the attic holds the majority of the archive, with little rhyme or reason to its colourful chaos. Despite a loose colour and thematic grouping, visitors are left to scour through a haphazard mix – piece after piece of personal belongings and borrowed archives –  with the unusual sights of a stepped wooden Hussein Chalayan skirt circled by high heels, a Haider Ackermann jacket casually draped over a vintage television set, and mannequins wearing Prada or Rick Owens surrounded by smashed shards of mirror on the floor. If not pure high fashion, it is certainly pure Hannelore, and she makes no apologies for that.

See our fashion photo gallery below, with art and photography to follow in the coming days.

Azzedine Alaia:

Jean Paul Gaultier:

Haider Ackermann:

Artwork by Haider Ackermann with accompanying song “Feeling Good” by Nina Simone.

“Birds flying high, you know how I feel. H.”

Hussein Chalayan:

The attic and beyond:

Above: Bernhard Willhelm tee shirts.

Above: Costume designed for the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Karen O by Christian Joy.

Above: Maison Martin Margiela bead waistcoat over Ann Demeulemeester dress, Haider Ackermann wrap neck dress, VPL padded shift dress.

Above: Hermès Spring Summer 2006 dress, as worn by Hannelore Knuts in the show.

Above: archive Yves Saint Laurent red dress and cape, in the Juergen Teller room.

Above: A selection of personal and borrowed archives, including a leather hooded jacket by Ann Demeulemeester and the green 3-d print parka and dress worn by Hannelore in the Prada Fall Winter 2004 show (far right).

Above: A selection of personal and borrowed archives, including a python jacket from Revillon by Rick Owens (far left), star corsets by Francesco Scognamiglio (centre) and lace pants bodysuit by Haider Ackermann (far right).

Top image: Hannelore Knuts in Jean Paul Gaultier by Jean Baptise Mondino, Fall Winter 2004.

Two of the 20th century’s contemporary masters of fashion sit side by side, their dark reflections mirrored on a glass table. Both choose black to shade their worlds with an intellectual and very human beauty – taking fabric to tell their culturally obtuse yet equally poetic stories. From the West comes Tunisian-born Azzedine Alaïa, whose dramatically body-conscious and skintight garments sculpt the feminine form – and from the East, Japanese-born Yohji Yamamoto, with a philosophy that celebrates the “air between the skin and the garment”. Benoit Peverelli captures their moment in film, while Laurence Benaïm, Creator and Director of Stiletto Magazine, talks to the two men on the eve of exciting projects – Yohji’s Pitti Immagine exhibition and Azzedine’s Marc Newson-designed shoe boutique opening in Paris. Here are some selected quotes from their talk:

THE BIG ART

Yohji Yamamoto: I prefer to show the hidden body. I’m a man but I think that what is on the inside is sexiest. If this season I have suggested a symbolic body by using pleats and tucks to indicate the figure, the bosom, the side, the back, it is because I don’t like to show the body ostentatiously. I prefer to dream.

Azzedine Alaïa: People pay more and more attention to themselves, to what they eat. The more interesting the body becomes, the closer I get to the skin.

WINTER FLOWERS

YY: Azzedine Alaïa has always tried to preserve the pleasure in his creations. It’s his priority. I admire his pride and his freedom.

AA: Yohji Yamamoto’s clothes, even when voluminous and floating, still define the body. THrough the work we are united by something unique, something which goes further than time, than our encounters. The mutual respect has become a friendship. It’s an alliance of presence.

RED PASSION

YY: Red isn’t a colour, it’s a light.

AA: There are red reds, violet reds. Red is another black. I never get bored of it.

THE FUTURE SOFTLY

YY: With my eyes turned to the past, I walk backwards into the future.

AA: Every morning I ask myself:”What will I learn today?”. I don’t make plans. I live by the day. I’m in good shape or I’m not.

FOREVER LOVE

YY: I like everything that is big in love. Even the excess.

AA: When I love, I embrace, I touch, I pinch.

The simplicity of a wooden crate, upturned in the corner of a room. The subtle complexity and strict workmanship in the box joints. The design is spartan, never crude, barely embellished save for the rich stain.

This is the object with which Tunisian-born designer Azzedine Alaïa chose to represent his vision, photographed by Mario Palmieri for A#3.

Alaïa is revered amongst his contemporaries and followers as a master of the feminine form, for his body-conscious designs that celebrate a fierce sensuality. His work is precise, streamlined and sits always just out of the spotlight of mainstream and trend-based fashion. This seems reflected by his chosen talisman – sitting askew from the wall and softly lit, while all the time casting a long shadow.

Obscure? Yes, but so seems the man himself.