In his twelve years of designing and creating wondrous chapeaux, Stephen Jones has accrued quite a repertoire of strange and bizarre tales that have tested his ample sense of humour (a definite necessity in the field of millinery). They range from the dubious - the exceptionally wealthy customer who knocked on his door one day, ordered twenty hats and paid for them in cash sight unseen, to the "night-marish" - although Stephen is "very, very careful" when he makes a hat for a particular occasion that he doesn't make another like it, there was the case of the two very well-known pop stars who arrived at the same party wearing the same hat, a situation that was ultimately resolved in fisticuffs. "You lose customers in these situations but you have to laugh about it...."

Then there was the time that Stephen was caught literally without his shirt clad only in his infamous walk shorts with his bald head gleaming by the unprepared high-powered duo of Grace Mirabella and Daniel Salem, formerly the gurus of American Vogue. "They had set up an appointment with me when they were in London several years ago but unfortunately they had mixed up the days", recalls Stephen. "It was the day after Ascot, I had given everybody the day off and I was in my old workroom which looked like a disaster after all the turmoil. I was wearing shorts and nothing else and I was cutting out a bridal veil when they walked in for their appointment. In my visions, they were just about the two most important people in the world and thank heavens, they just roared with laughter. I told them that I was terribly sorry but I would have to continue working on the veil because the bride was getting married the next morning. Grace ended up answering my phone for me!"