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.”
Here, Jones looks back on his memories of the Queen, from his first childhood sightings of her to the various times he crossed paths with her at Buckingham Palace soirées, and reflects on her powerful, enduring legacy within the fashion world. I think I was first aware of the Queen as a young boy in the mid-to-late 1960s. That was when she was taking many trips around the world, particularly to the Commonwealth, and I remember loving the fact that when she went to went on a state visit to Pakistan, she wore green, the national color. I thought, how wonderful that could be a motive for wearing certain things—that fashion didn’t need to be inspired by the magazines, it could be inspired by the place you were visiting, for example. I was very aware of that straight away. I also remember my grandmother had a book that she got at the coronation, a big sort of fold-out, which described the Queen’s Norman Hartnell dress in detail. I was so fascinated by the embroideries: there was a thistle for Scotland, the daffodil for Wales, and the shamrock for Northern Ireland. The idea of clothes representing certain places is, bizarrely enough, something that has defined my hats. They’re always about a place—even the collection I’m working on now is about Morocco.
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