Philip Treacy (right) and fashion critic Isabella Blow who wears his Suzhou-garden hat.

Shanghai Daily news

A simple bonnet can metamorphose into a piece of visual art. Irish milliner Philip Treacy showed his otherworldly hats and headdresses to a star-packed audience at the just-concluded 2004 Lycra Channel Young Instyle Fashion Awards.
Exotic shapes of butterfly cluster, satellite dish, devil horns, involute conch and hummingbirds provided a theatrical twist to the brilliant show. Treacy's hats embrace fantasy with incredible energy and reveal why he is known as the master of modern millinery. Some are larger than any human head could conceivably carry off, no matter how light the material. Others are so small as to defy a head to wear them.
"Hatmaking is a craft. I'm here to inspire people to rethink about hats and to make people aware of how important it is to wear hats," says the 37-year-old designer whose creations have graced the heads of some of the biggest names on the celebrity scene, including the Duchess of York, Madonna, Victoria Beckham, Celine Dion and Goldie Hawn.
Treacy was in town to pick up "Instyle Designer of the Year" award. To mark the occasion, he made a special hat which is an intriguing miniature of a Suzhou-style garden of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). It was worn by eccentric fashion critic Isabella Blow at the Lycra night.
"This is just my interpretation of China," says Treacy. "China has a rich history in hatmaking. It's an object of beauty and elegance."
Treacy says he believes that hats are not just museum pieces for show and will enjoy a renaissance soon as people become more daring and want to express their personality by what they wear.
"When I started designing hats first, 15 years ago, they were long out of fashion. Hats were associated with old ladies and I thought that was crazy," explains Treacy. "Everyone has a head so everyone has the potential to wear a hat. Some people say: 'I don't suit hats and they don't look good on me.' You just haven't found the right hat yet. There is a hat for everybody."
Treacy has designed hats for many haute couture houses such as Chanel, Givenchy, Alexander McQueen, Valentino, Helmut Lang and Versace.
He began to make hats simply because "I enjoy working with my hands," he says. "I only feel dressed in the morning when I've got my thimble on my middle finger."
In 1985, Treacy studied at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin before moving to London to attend the prestigious Royal College of Art in 1988. There he specialized in hat design, fashioning his first efforts from bits and pieces picked up in local flea markets. While a student, he started to work with established designers such as Rifat Ozbek, John Galliano and Victor Edelstein. His graduation show in 1991 caused a fashion sensation.
Treacy went on to win the title of "Accessory Designer of the Year" at the British Fashion Awards in 1991, 1992 and 1993, and then again in 1996 and 1997.
When, in 2000, he was invited by the Chambre Syndicale, the governing body of French fashion, to participate in haute couture shows in Paris, he became the first millinery designer to do so in 70 years.
Like many other international designers, Treacy is very keen on China's expanding luxury market.
"In Europe, we really believe that China is the future," he says without disclosing any business plans he may have.
Treacy is best-known for his enormous, gravity-defying sculptures and surreal extravagances in headwear. He says he hates rules and formulas.
One of his millinery muses is fashion critic Isabella Blow who has helped him become a household name by stepping out in his outrageous hats for more than a decade.
"If you met Isabella, the sort of charm of Isabella's hat-wearing is that she wears them like she's not really wearing a hat at all. She feels much more normal when she's wearing her hats than when she's not. It's part of her life," says Treacy.
Blow introduced Treacy to many established designers like Manolo Blahnik and Rifat Ozbek, as well as fashion editors such as Andre Leon Talley of US Vogue. When he left the Royal College in 1990, he moved into the basement of Blow's house and set up a studio there.
His creations for Blow ranged from "The Ship," a replica of an 18th-century sailing ship under full sail and "The Castle," based on Blow's ancestral home at Doddington Park, to "Gilbert and George," a surreal concoction of pink and green lacquered ostrich feathers on a mortar board so wide that Blow couldn't fit through the door of the charity event she had ordered it for.
"One of the exciting things about making a hat is to turn a two-dimensional idea into a three-dimensional creation," he says.
Treacy's hats for celebrities usually bear a price tag of 1,000 pounds (US$1,886) and up.
Recently he expanded his vision and millinery collection with the debut of his line of accessories, which include hair ornaments, scarves, gloves and bags. He has also started on a ready-to-wear collection.
"Nowadays fashion is what you perceive it to be or what you choose it to be, not something dictated by designers," he says. "However, as a hat designer I have an opportunity to influence how people perceive a hat in the 21st century. Hats were all too recently seen as a conformist accessory. Today things are the opposite. It's rebellious to wear a hat."