Stephen Jones remembers the first time he saw the Queen with absolute clarity: as a young boy growing up in rural Cheshire, he was enamored by the outfits she would wear while touring the Commonwealth, beamed into his television at home from all four corners of the world. “She was acutely aware of the power of fashion, and I think she was very respectful of the craft of fashion too,” Jones recalls. “She knew that her appearance was a metaphor which could be used in many different ways.”
Over the following decades, as Jones became one of the most celebrated and respected British milliners in history, the Queen would become a recurring figure within his work—whether the silkscreened prints he made as part of his art foundation course in 1975, featuring images of the Queen set against a richly colored sky, or the tweed crowns he crafted for Vivienne Westwood, memorably captured by Nick Knight for a cover of i-D magazine in 1987 worn by Westwood herself. “Vivienne adored the Queen’s tweeds as a little girl, so it was completely a tribute,” Jones remembers.
Jones became part of the royal establishment himself in the following years, whether through his role as a go-to milliner for Diana, Princess of Wales, who was first introduced to Jones’s work by Jasper Conran in the early 1980s, or his appointment as an OBE in 2010. But his appreciation of the Queen’s style extends beyond the rarefied realm of royalty, with Jones even noting that when he was knocking around the punk scene or hitting up the Blitz club with the New Romantics in the late 1970s, their iconoclastic take on her style came from a place of admiration, too. “What we loved was the glamour, the spectacular jewelry, hats, clothing,” Jones says. “The fact that she was unapologetic about it and wore what she believed in.”
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