Why 101 HATS Is a Book, Not Another Exhibition: Three Milliner Voices Behind the Fifth 920 Festival's Biggest Launch

Every edition of the 920 Hat Festival raises the same quiet question: what should be the centerpiece this year? For the fifth edition, scheduled around September 20, 2026, the answer was not a bigger runway or a larger exhibition hall. It was a book. The 101 HATS book was positioned for a global launch at the festival, and the decision to anchor a major hat industry event around a printed volume says a great deal about where modern millinery culture is heading.

This article looks at the project from several angles: why a book, what it is meant to capture, who stepped forward to endorse it, and what it offers designers, collectors, and brands who care about hat design beyond a single season.

🔽 Quick Navigation

• 📌 Why the Fifth 920 Festival Chose a Book Instead of Another Exhibition
• 📌 What "101 HATS" Is Meant to Capture: Craftsmanship, Brand Philosophy, and Emotional Value
• 📌 Three Forewords, Three Perspectives: Stephen Jones, Roger Tredre, and Elly Stemerdink
• 📌 Collecting the Present for the Future: The Philosophy Behind the 101 Series
• 📌 What a Designer Hat Actually Looks Like on the Page: Sculptural Form, Material Experiments
• 📌 What the 101 HATS Project Means for Headwear Brands, Buyers, and Collectors
  
• ❓FAQ

Why the Fifth 920 Festival Chose a Book Instead of Another Exhibition

An exhibition ends when the lights go off. A runway lasts minutes. A social media post is buried within a day. For a creative field as visual and as temporary as hat design, those formats are good at generating attention and poor at preserving knowledge. A book works on a different clock: it can sit on a studio shelf, travel to a design school library, or be handed from one collector to another long after the 920 Hat Festival has finished.

That thinking appears to sit behind the decision to avoid simply adding one more item to the festival program. The organizers wanted something with weight, both literally and culturally, something that could hold the craftsmanship of the pieces, the philosophy of the designers behind them, and the emotional value these objects carry. Calling it "101 HATS" sets a clear editorial rule: a curated selection rather than an exhaustive catalog, where every inclusion has to earn its place. For the headwear industry, which rarely produces serious reference publications of its own, that curatorial discipline is the main point of the exercise.

There is also a practical publishing logic. A printed volume can be shipped to fashion schools, museums, and private studios in dozens of countries without the cost of moving fragile pieces. That portability turns a single-day hat festival moment into something that keeps circulating, and it lets people who could never travel to the event still engage with the work on the page.

What "101 HATS" Is Meant to Capture: Craftsmanship, Brand Philosophy, and Emotional Value

The framing around the 101 HATS collection goes beyond showing attractive objects. Three layers are meant to coexist on every page. The first is the physical object: the construction, the material choices, and the finishing that make a piece worth studying. The second is the thinking behind it, the design philosophy of the milliner or brand responsible. The third is harder to photograph but just as important: the emotional value, meaning why someone wore, kept, or commissioned the piece in the first place.

This three-layer approach is what separates a reference book from a lookbook. A lookbook sells the next season; a reference book explains why a design exists. For students and working designers, that explanation is often more useful than the image itself, because it shows how a sculptural idea moves from sketch to hat construction and what compromises or breakthroughs happened along the way. It also gives hat collectors something they rarely get: documented context that can support provenance and appreciation over time. The forthcoming 101 Hats: The Best in Modern Millinery listing from ACC Art Books gives a sense of how the project is being presented to the wider publishing world.

Three Forewords, Three Perspectives: Stephen Jones, Roger Tredre, and Elly Stemerdink

A book about a niche craft succeeds or fails on credibility, and the project has attracted written endorsements from three respected voices in the international millinery world. Each approaches the subject from a different professional position, which is exactly why the combination is persuasive. The table below summarizes who they are and what each emphasizes.

Stephen Jones frames the project as more than a celebration of hat-making skill. His point is that it can encourage people to treat the head as part of their creative expression, rather than stopping at the collar. Roger Tredre, writing from an academic fashion perspective, describes the collection as free from conventional rules and etiquette, allowing the hat to be celebrated in a way it rarely is. Elly Stemerdink, who leads a long-running trade publication serving the global hat industry, sees the series as both a tribute to worldwide craftsmanship and a thoughtful addition to the industry's cultural record. Taken together, the three comments cover the creative, academic, and trade dimensions of the field, which is a rare level of alignment for a headwear publication.

Collecting the Present for the Future: The Philosophy Behind the 101 Series

The fourth voice in the table belongs to the person driving the project. Sun Jianhua, widely known in the hat community as "Hat Bro," describes collecting not as a way of preserving the past but as a way of gathering the present so that it can be useful later. Leaving something meaningful behind for the industry, or even for the wider world, is in his words a joyful and rewarding journey in itself.

That philosophy explains why a hat museum and a book can belong to the same story. Anyone who has followed the founder's broader body of work in hat culture will recognize the pattern: assemble pieces, study them, then find a durable way to share what was learned. The hat museum in Nantong is one expression of that instinct. The 101 HATS series is another, extending the same collecting logic from physical shelves to a format that can travel internationally. Instead of waiting for historians to document today's work decades from now, the project documents it while the designers are still active and the context is still fresh.

What a Designer Hat Actually Looks Like on the Page: Sculptural Form, Material Experiments

One of the questions raised in the festival announcement is simple but telling: what do hats by the world's leading designers actually look like? The honest answer is that many do not resemble the hats people see in shops. Pieces such as "Bamboo Flower" by designer Shang Xiaorong show how far contemporary hat design can move from the conventional crown-and-brim template. The work is sculptural and botanical in spirit, closer to wearable art than a seasonal accessory, and it is exactly the sort of piece that benefits from careful photography and editorial context.

Seeing such work in print matters for practical reasons as well as aesthetic ones. A sculptural headpiece often depends on specific materials, structural wire, hand blocking, or applied surface techniques, and a good reference book makes those decisions visible. Designers who work with natural fibers will find the logic familiar; the same questions about weave, tension, and shape retention appear in everyday products such as custom straw hats, just at a far more experimental scale. A runway piece rarely becomes a bestseller, but its proportions, material pairing, or construction trick can quietly influence the commercial headwear design that follows. This trickle-down effect is one of the least visible but most important ways creative hat design reaches ordinary shoppers: first as an extreme idea, then as a softened curve, a new trim, or a fresh material combination in products people actually wear.

What the 101 HATS Project Means for Headwear Brands, Buyers, and Collectors

For brands and sourcing teams, a project like this is a useful signal about where creative standards are being set. Publications that document top-tier modern millinery tend to shape the visual vocabulary that designers, stylists, and buyers draw on in later seasons. Understanding that vocabulary helps a brand brief a manufacturer more precisely, whether the goal is a faithful interpretation or a simplified, wearable version. Teams planning a custom hat program often get better results when the conversation starts from reference images and construction logic rather than from a vague mood.

For hat collectors, the benefit is stability. Documented pieces, named designers, and written context make a collection easier to understand and share. For students, the book becomes a study tool that connects technique with outcome, showing how a finished form depends on dozens of small decisions about fiber, weight, and balance. And for the wider hat culture community, it signals that headwear is being treated with the same editorial seriousness long given to other design disciplines. The fifth 920 Hat Festival therefore matters not only as an event on a calendar, but as a moment when a creative field chose to write itself down.