Philip Treacy
I always design the hat with the wearer in mind; otherwise, it's an inanimate object.Collection: Design
In Rome, I particularly love the history, churches, sculptures and architecture and the fact that you can walk along a tiny cobbled street and turn the corner to find the Trevi Fountain. London is evocative of other eras and full of history.Collection: Architecture
What I love most about Her Majesty is that she has kept hats alive in people's minds for more than 60 years. You can't think of her without imagining her with a hat or a crown. I would, of course, love to design one for her.Collection: Design
Often, what makes my job so exciting is designing for the mother whose dream has been to wear one of my hats at her child's wedding. I feel as responsible for making her feel like a million dollars as I do for somebody in the public eye.Collection: Wedding
Hats are the epitome of Englishness, and a royal wedding is the penultimate moment for a hat designer. I'm Irish, but I am a royalist and I believe in fantasy.Collection: Wedding
There's a technicality to designing and wearing hats. A hat is balancing the proportions of your face; it's like architecture or mathematics.Collection: Architecture
There is no attitude required. The hat brings the attitude. And when people try on a hat they like, it is a bit of fun. It makes them laugh. You don't laugh when you put on a pair of shoes, but you do with a hat.Collection: Attitude
I'm representative of 21st century Irish design, so I promote Irishness all over the world wherever I go.Collection: Design
Royalty is completely different than celebrity. Royalty has a magic all its own.
How a hat makes you feel is what a hat is all about.
Elegance is all in the mind of the wearer.
The personality of the wearer and the hat makes the hat.
Wearing a hat is fun; people have a good time when they're wearing a hat.
Everybody loves things that sparkle.
At home, I had seven brothers, one sister. I sewed clothes for my sister's dolls although she was grown and gone away. I was a weirdo but didn't think I was a weirdo.
Hat-making is laborious and time-consuming. It's a very tactile medium, and you can develop the skills, but it's one of those things: you either have it, or you don't. I love bringing something to fruition with my hands that gives people pleasure.
I make hats for lots of iconic people, and that makes my job very interesting.
I believe in originality, primarily. However, it's important to know what there has been before to aim in that direction. Art history informs us. It informs our mind. I like to look at books, exhibitions, paintings, as a computer, subconsciously taking on information.
Try on 100 different hats if you can, until you find the one that suits you best. It's a trial and error thing.
You always see a better side of where you're visiting when a local shows you around.
Somebody can feel elegant without being elegant. It's a personality.
I remember in the early nineties people saying the hat was just for old women, but that's ridiculous.
I used to make clothes for my sister's dolls. I couldn't care less for the dolls, but I could make the clothes really easily.
My mother had a sewing machine. I was never allowed to use it, but I was so fascinated by this little needle going up and down joining fabric together that I'd use it when my mother went out to feed the chickens.
I was just, as a child, very different from the others, and didn't really care what they thought because you know, a child doesn't really have inhibitions; you sort of gain your inhibitions later.
When people come and visit me and have a hat made, it's a little bit like visiting a psychiatrist, but they don't actually realize that.
America brought us the baseball cap; it's one of my favorite hats.
The only person I never made a hat for was my mother because my mother didn't really - she preferred to make her own hats. I mean, she was intrigued by everything, but she didn't want one of my hats. She made her own.
I believe that I am a hat designer, not a milliner.
I like hats that make the heart beat faster.
A person carries off the hat. Hats are about emotion. It is all about how it makes you feel.
I love the romance of what I do, although because of Isabella, Lady Gaga and Grace Jones, people think I have crazy customers. Sometimes I get more enthusiasm from the housewife who wants a hat and believes in it.
Hats are radical; only people that wear hats understand that.
Hats are for life's ultimate moments. They're worn at races, at weddings. Occasions many of us, who aren't royals and celebrities, only attend once or twice in a lifetime.
I grew up in a little village in the west of Ireland.
Fashion is an illusion. It's a multibillion-pound industry that has to appear frivolous. Designers work and work and work, all night sometimes.
Women come into our shop for that ultimate moment in their life. They're buying a dream. They're buying a moment for themselves. That's what I sell - moments.
Hats are attached to special moments in people's lives - weddings, or the races. In difficult times, people still get married; they still want to look their best.
Certainly, people like Gaga have introduced a new type of hat-wearing.
People are dressing like stars, which is kind of fantastic.
I believe in a democratic approach to fashion: if you feel good, then great. You may not look good, but it's not the problem.
The success of a hat definitely lies with balancing the personality of the wearer with the type of occasion. Don't listen to those rules about face shape.
When people think of hats, they think of her majesty the queen.
When you meet someone, you meet their face. It's the most potent part of the body to embellish.
Fantasy hats give you the possibility to dream.
I want to excite the eye through hatmaking.
People, when they buy a hat, they can't explain why they want to buy it or why they want it, but they do. It's like chocolate.
I do say I'm a specialist in divas. Name a diva - I've worked with 'em.
I must point out - Sarah Jessica Parker is not a diva - she's one of these pop culture characters that everybody likes.
The classic hat image was during the Forties and Fifties, and Elizabeth Taylor was the epitome of that; she was the ultimate celebrity of excess and glamour, and she worked major sun hats.