“The key to great millinery,” Stephen Jones said in 2018, “is freshness and spontaneity. And a simplicity. Sometimes hats can start to look very complicated because they’re overworked. In words, a haiku is maybe the most beautiful thing.” Beautiful things, indeed, are the gestures, puns, deconstructions, sighs of desire, historical footnotes, jokes, and yes, haiku that Jones creates for the head. Born in 1957 in Cheshire, England, and educated in Liverpool and at London’s Saint Martins School of Art, Jones came of age in the 1980s, one of the New Romantics on the London club scene. He was soon doing hats for the V&A and for designers of the couture—Galliano, Gaultier, Mugler, Westwood, and Vuitton among them. This exhibition at Palais Galliera is its first in over 40 years to be entirely devoted to the hat as a work of art. “When you think too much about it,” the brilliant Jones told me, “it all goes wrong.” Get ready for the surreal flights of his subconscious. —Laura Jacobs