JONES, STEPHEN-THE MAD HATTER ©

  
By Polly Guerin
RWA Fashion Historian

Do your characters wear hats? They should! Men always notice women who wear hats and pay compliments as if they were greeting the Queen Mum. Millinery gives a woman regal stature, it completes an outfit, it can create an air of mystery, tempting a man to find out what’s she is all about.

But who would ever predicted that a young boy growing up in the 1960’s, who aspired to be an astronaut, would one day become the British Mad Hatter, Stephen Jones, whose celebrity is synonymous with the millinery he has created for the fashion cognoscenti, superstars and royals. Stephen Jones burst on the London fashion scene during the explosion of street style in the late seventies and his oeuvre has proliferated into millinery stardom. He is considered to be one of the world’s most radical and important milliners of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. No wonder Jones was selected to co-curate the 2009 exhibition Hats: An Anthology for the Victoria & Albert Museum and to return triumphantly to New York to present Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones, a collaboration between the Victoria & Albert Museum and Jones, which opened September 16, 2011 at the Bard Graduate Center of Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture in New York City.

BECOMING THE CELEBRITY MILLINER
Jones was one of the original style-blazers of fashion and opened his first millinery salon in the basement of a trendy store in Endell Street in the heart of Covent Garden. “Overnight I had a business,” Jones commented in 2008. The Stephen Jones mystique and his ability to create iconic styles drew to its atelier rock stars to royalty, from Boy George to his regular client followers from Blitz and even Diana, Princess of Wales as a regular customer, to give them the head turning headgear that would make arresting headlines. His celebrity on the rise, Jones had a hat commissioned by the Victoria & Albert museum for their newly refurbished Costume Court, which was the beginning of Jones’ long and fruitful relationship with the V&A.

RED CARPET CONNECTIONS
Jones’ prolific oeuvre brought his creations to the fashion world creating hats for the catwalk shows of many leading couturiers and fashion designers including John Galliano at Dior and Vivienne Westwood. In 1984 Jones relocated his studio to Lexington Street and that year Jean-Paul Gaultier invited him to Paris to make hats for his show and subsequently he received full credit for his hats thus assuring that the Paris cognoscenti was made aware of his hats. It was inevitable that Jones would enter the retail arena and in the same year he also sold his first designs to a department store, Bloomingdales in New York. From the red carpet to fashion runways to race courses, garden parties and fashion magazine covers millinery by Stephen Jones are crowning achievements of originality, head turners on the fashion and social circuits.

STEPHEN JONES TODAY
His work is always identified by its inventiveness, its witty statement, its novel approach to subject matter and most importantly its high level of technical expertise. From the catwalk to the couture collaborations Jones’s hats have been an integral component in some of the most memorable runway spectacles of the past quarter century. In addition to his Model Milliner collection, he designs the widely-distributed Miss Jones and Jonesboy diffusion ranges, plus a JonesGirl accessories line exclusively for Japan. His hats are represented in the permanent collections of major museums worldwide and are always at the forefront of fashion on magazine covers and in the window displays of the world’s most celebrated boutiques and retail stores.

BECOMING A MILLINERY ICON

If truth be told Jones came into the fashion orbit of millinery in quite a serendipitous manner. Jones readily admits his faults and his triumphs, “I attended Saint Martins, but I couldn’t master sewing. However, despite this shortcoming I became an intern in the tailoring department of the London couture house, Lacasse.” However, upon observing the magical haven of creativity elsewhere Jones soon requested a transfer to the next-door millinery department. It was presided over by Shirley Hex and between 1976 and 1979 Jones spent his summer breaks working for Hex and learning about millinery methods and techniques. Jones left St. Martins in 1979 and the same year he became one of the style-blazers at London’s legendary Blitz nightclub himself competing to wear the most outrageous outfits including a pinstripe suit with stiletto heels. Many of the Blitz kids became his first clients, with Jones creating outlandish hats for them to wear to the club.

STEPHEN JONES IS POSSIBLY THE MOST ORIGINAL MILLINER
Rising to the heights of creativity Stephen Jones born on the Wirral Peninsula in Cheshire on the 31st of May 1957, and schooled in Liverpool, has propelled his art into the future and continues to attract a celebrity clientele which includes Rihanna, Christina Aguilera, Whoopi Goldberg, and Cher. Hamish Bowles, Vogue USA said, “His genius is to enhance the mystery, allure and wit of the wearer.” Jones was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2010 New Year Honours.

STEPHEN JONES AT BARD
The show at Bard is comprised of more than 250 hats, the majority of which are chosen by Jones himself from the V&A’s extraordinary hat collection. Visitors will see hats ranging from the twelfth-century Egyptian fez to a 1950s Balenciaga design and couture creation by Jones and his contemporaries. A selection of rare film footage shows the elegant Jacqueline Kennedy, who almost single handedly revived the hat industry in the United States by her allegiance to this sartorial finery, wearing hats at the presidential inauguration in 1961. Look into Jones’s amazing atelier workroom where creativity spills forth over desks and floor in a profusion of ribbons and trims. The exhibit runs through April 15, 2012.♥



Polly Guerin honed her skills as an accessories editor at the tony trade newspaper Women’s Wear Daily. She currently maintains four Blogs including http://www.pollytalkfromnewyork.blogspot.com which runs every Monday. Visit Polly at http://www.pollytalk.com/ and click in the right-hand column on the Blog of your interest. Her recent feature on Marianne Brandt, Art Deco modernist is scheduled to publish in Contemporary Literary Horizon magazine in Bulgaria France and Italy.

LET YOUR CHARACTERS DO THE DRIVING

by Margaret Birth

If you’ve ever listened to a group of writers discuss the merits of “plot-driven” versus “character-driven” fiction, then you know how contentious and confusing such a debate can be. If you’re wondering what position you, as a romance writer, should take, the answer is this: In order to keep your romantic story on the right road, let your characters do the driving.

Plot-driven fiction places the focus on the plot; characters’ development is secondary, as long as their actions fit the plot. This isn’t to say that plot-driven fiction can’t have likable characters—but characters’ internal conflicts take a backseat to external conflicts, and goals tend to be plot-related rather than emotionally generated. Mysteries, with their emphasis on crime, investigation, and process of discovery, are plot-driven.

Since romantic fiction is, first and foremost, the story of a hero and a heroine who fall in love, it is necessarily character-driven. Now, that’s not to say that all romance authors (particularly aspiring romance authors) write character-driven stories. I’ve seen several romantic suspense manuscripts, in particular, in which what is only supposed to be a suspense subplot (i.e., only one part of the story of a hero and heroine’s romance) takes over the whole story. Here are some tips for avoiding such pitfalls in your romantic fiction:

* Ask yourself what your hero and heroine’s goals, strengths, weaknesses, and motivations are; ask yourself how they act and react to one another, to other characters, and to the situations they encounter. Who your characters are influences why and how they act and react the way they do; and how they act and react (particularly with regard to one another) is what should form the basis of your plot.

* Keep your hero and heroine together as much as possible. Represent time apart by summarizing briefly—for example: “Dani heard a knock at her front door. It was sharp, insistent—the way he always knocked. She couldn’t believe it had been two weeks since she’d seen him last. She ran to open the door, and fell into Justin’s arms.” If you allow your hero and heroine too much alone-time, then too much of the story will focus on what they do while they’re apart, rather than on who they are and how their love grows.

*To really put your story into perspective (if you have a completed manuscript), put one color of Post-It Notes on every page that focuses on the love story and another color on every page that focuses on something else (whether suspense subplot, the heroine’s job, or whatever); for your story to be a romance, at least 60% of the Post-It Notes should be on pages that show the hero and heroine’s developing relationship. ♥



Margaret Birth is a Christian writer who has been widely published in short fiction, short nonfiction, and poetry, both in the U.S. and abroad; in addition to working as a freelance writer, she's spent over a decade freelancing for multiple publishers as a manuscript reader, proofreader, and copy editor.

CREATING CONFLICT: DON’T FIGHT IT—FINESSE IT (Part Two)

    
by Margaret Birth

Look in the mirror. What do you see? Okay, I’ll tell you what I see: a nice head of chestnut brown hair faded to silver in places (hey, I earned those grays!), blue-green eyes rimmed with laugh lines (blessedly, I’ve had much more to laugh about than to cry about in recent years!), a nose I used to think was too wide for my face, and a mouth I love to use for singing. When I look in the mirror, what I see is influenced not only by my outer appearance, but also by my inner impressions.

It’s those inner impressions, those feelings, and the background that brought them into being that form the basis of internal conflict for story characters too. But that’s only one kind of conflict our tales need in order to have the complexity and depth that will keep readers turning pages.

Stories also need external conflict. Thankfully, in some ways, external conflict is a lot easier to understand—and thus, to create—than internal conflict.

In my previous work as a freelance manuscript reader, I saw many manuscripts in which a hero or heroine was stand-offish or argumentative with their supposed love-interest, but it was never clear why: It was never related to a clear and compelling internal conflict.

In contrast, I saw several manuscripts in which complicated, confusing external conflicts overwhelmed the romance plot. However, I’ve seen few manuscripts in which there was absolutely no external conflict at all.

External conflict is easy to define: External conflict is any event, condition, person, group, or organization that keeps the hero and heroine apart—physically, emotionally, and/or spiritually.

The best external conflicts often relate to characters’ internal conflicts. Say our heroine is a prosecution lawyer—pursuing justice since she, herself, was an abused foster child. Now she can’t believe she’s falling for a defense attorney. Imagine that a man she’d once had convicted for child molestation is let out on parole. Suddenly someone starts stalking her and traumatizing kids in her neighborhood. She assumes he’s responsible for these latest heinous acts, but the hero insists that the guy is innocent until proven guilty. Zounds! What powerful external conflict! And that’s, in part, because it’s perfectly tied in with the heroine’s internal conflict.

Keep external conflicts simple and logical: she’s a born-again Christian, and he’s agnostic (here the opposing faiths are the conflict); she comes from a wealthy family, and he comes from a poor one (here the conflict is that they come from socially and economically different worlds); she keeps pursuing an investigation of a shady politician despite the fact that she keeps on having mysterious accidents, and he’s hell-bent on protecting her (a classic woman-in-jeopardy conflict).

A short romance novel doesn’t need more than one external conflict, a longer one maybe two or three.

External conflicts don’t need to have seemingly endless, convoluted ins-and-outs and extra characters in order to be interesting, though. After all, external conflict that’s too complex takes a reader’s focus away from the most important part of the story: the romance.♥



Margaret Birth is a Christian writer who has been widely published in short fiction, short nonfiction, and poetry, both in the U.S. and abroad; in addition to working as a freelance writer, she's spent over a decade freelancing for multiple publishers as a manuscript reader, proofreader, and copy editor.

SUBWAY WRITING TIPS PART 2: Breakups and Cute Animals

By K. Keith



Continuing the discussion of hidden romance writing benefits when one takes the subway, kindly allow me to introduce you to Exhibit B: Breakups and Cute Animals.

Picture this: I’m on a subway train which is going over some big bridge (I always forget which one ). My nose is buried in a book. All of a sudden, the tranquility is broken by a woman screaming into her cellphone, “How can you do this to me, Nicholas (or Jason, or whatever his name was )?! How can you leave me? Is it because of Elise?” I give her a sneaky glance, and then survey my fellow passengers, who are either studying their newspapers, their cell phones or the gum stuck to the floor. Basically we’re all pretending that we’re not witnesses to a relationship meltdown. Ah, but later---this could be great fodder for an argument scene in one’s romance novel.

On to Cute Animals. While waiting for a train, I hear a sound coming from the tracks below. It sounds exactly like someone typing on a noisy keyboard. Hmmm….This is odd even for the subway. I look down and see—a rat standing on its hind legs and holding a bagel with its front paws; Quite the noisy eater for a little fellow. Since then, I’ve given a mouse in my romance novel some of that rat’s cheekiness.♥


K. Keith is a RWANYC member. She's busy writing her first historical romance about Hexford, aka Lord Wilton, and Juliana.


DO LEAVE A COMMENT and let us know what you’ve observed on your subway/bus ride that might end up in your next novel.