At GAP's AW09/10 clothing presentation yesterday Love magazine caught up with milliner extraordinaire Stephen Jones. The designer, who curated the Hats Anthology exhibition currently on view at London’s V&A Gallery, spoke to the rag about a bone he has to pick with Michelle Obama, getting denied by Aretha Franklin, and his favorite hat out of all of the chapeaus included in the exhibition.

“I would love to have a word with Michelle Obama, because she didn’t wear a hat for President Obama’s inauguration. I think there a few occasions when one really should stand on ceremony,” Jones told Love. Did he approve of Aretha Franklin’s Inaugural pill box hat, which was adorned with an enormous bow? You bet. “We tried to get it for the exhibition and she said no, but she sent me the most wonderful letter that she had also sent to a museum in Washington. It said that she was hugely flattered to be asked, but that to sing as an African American woman at the inauguration of a black president was the proudest moment of her career, and that she wants to be able to look at that hat every day for the rest of her life and remember.” I guess you can’t blame her. As for Jones’ favorite piece in all of the V&A museum: “the Elsa Schiaparelli shoe hat: it was made by her but designed by Salvador Dali, and it belongs to a museum that spent £40,000 on it.”