Philip Treacy on the hat that stole the royal wedding

Philip Treacy, OBE, is as reasonable in person as he is extravagant in his hats. Indeed, he comes across as possibly the most unprecious, un-Mad Hatterish designer in the fashion industry; so much so that he actually grins when I introduce the delicate subject of that hat, and global talking point, worn by Princess Beatrice at this year’s royal wedding.

Naturally, I don’t bring up the “unique sculptural celebratory headpiece”, as it was billed on eBay (also described, less flatteringly, elsewhere as a Turkey Twizzler, giant pretzel and pair of antlers) straightaway, partly because there’s so much else to see first. I arrive a bit early at Treacy’s three-floor office cum dream factory, around the corner from Battersea Dogs Home, where he greets me warmly and takes me off on a tour. At 46, he has the most open, boyish, freckly face, and with his bright blue eyes, floppy hair and rounded features, reminds me of someone forever wholesome and innocent, like Huckleberry Finn.

First, Treacy shows me his version of a supercar (he doesn’t own a real one), slumbering somewhat forlornly in the distant depths of a dark storage area – a beautiful antique Russian carriage, all faded golds and filigree, with a bell that still works and worn stirrups at the back. Then it’s up the stairs, with him pointing out an impressive picture of a gold unicorn (“That’s not my family crest, by the way; it’s my logo”), a wall of watercolour frock designs painted by Karl Lagerfeld which Treacy bought years ago, and a large original drawing by fashion illustrator Richard Gray of Isabella Blow as a sort Boadicea mermaid, in fishscale armour, a Treacy-esque helmet crowned with massive ray-like spikes, astride a chariot with two horses galloping in front of her: “Alexander [McQueen] gave it to me. He said the horse on the left was me, and he was on the right.”

It takes me a few seconds to recognise the photo of a sculptural shape of pale gold feathers all curving in one direction, as though blown by a high wind, to be the hat worn by the Duchess of Cornwall on her wedding day. “She’s a very, very nice person,” Treacy says. “I have such diverse clients… There’s a very big difference between Lady Gaga and Prince Charles’s wife. But there isn’t, but there is,” he adds in his broad Irish lilt, sounding like a cross between Father Ted and Little Britain.

On another stairway is a Vogue cover, black and white and hugely blown up, of a substantial naked cleavage, a gap-toothed model, her face covered in a lacy black mask – which is another Treacy trademark and has led, I later discover, to an outbreak of Mask Wars between two of his high-profile clients.

Into the workroom, where a tiny woman, Waka Murai, who has worked with Treacy for 20 years, is sticking white turkey feathers into a white straw hat, cocooned in folds of silk, which will be worn by some gorgeous American six foot blonde for a Bentley car promotion in California. There are feather boas hanging from the ceiling, hats everywhere of course, a table of half a dozen women sewing, pasting, cutting, and a wall covered in photos of Treacy with Monica Lewinsky, Kate Moss in a mask, Grace Jones, Pamela Anderson, Princess Beatrice in a “I ❤ NY” T-shirt, some babies and a clipping of Audrey Hepburn. She is possibly a muse, from beyond the grave, since Treacy loves old-fashioned glamour. He can sound quite tart on the subject of modern-day red carpet mores: “Celebrities used to have style; now they have stylists,” he says, pithily. “At the Oscars now, people look dreadful. Marlene Dietrich didn’t have a stylist; Marilyn Monroe didn’t have a stylist. They had style, these people.”

He takes a speckled feather, one of a dozen sprouting from sponge squares, and starts to trim it – so that an already elegant shape is sculpted into something resembling a narrow schooner sail. This one is a Lady Amherst pheasant, he explains, that one is a golden pheasant, but the one that delights him most – principally because of the name – is the plumage of the bustard.

Our interview is conducted in an excessively brightly-lit room where his clients come for their hat fittings. The walls are covered in open shelves, with each chapeau resplendent in its own slot – from apricot velvet fedoras to puce and lime pillboxes. So let’s get Princess B’s outlandish fascinator out of the way. She was but one of 36 Treacy hat-wearers at the wedding, from the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire to Victoria Beckham.

I mention all the internet action provoked by that hat, including Facebook pages in which it featured as everything from a loo seat to the mocked-up image of Barack Obama with his National Security team, all wearing the pretzel, as they watched the commando raid on Osama bin Laden’s complex in Pakistan.

I wonder whether Treacy, as the creator of the hat, was able to find any of it funny? “Of course!” he says, gamely. How did he first find out about the comic fallout? “I was in New York, two days after the wedding, for the Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met, and I was up early watching TV, when three people on a breakfast show were laughing their heads off about her hat and I thought, ‘Wow! Okay-eee.’

“Look, the best way I can explain it is that People magazine did a survey on her hat and 18 per cent loved it, 34 per cent hated it and the other percentage didn’t know what to make of it – and I’m with the 18 per cent. I thought I was making a hat with a bow.”

Did you see the image of President Obama and Hillary Clinton et al wearing the hat in the Situation Room? “Yes! It was hilarious! It was fabulous! I loved Andy Warhol, and that was what it was, pop culture.” He goes on, “I was on Google [presumably searching for mentions of his hat] and this very serious political website just came up, and they were genuinely explaining that one of the reasons they didn’t release an image of Osama bin Laden [dead] was that they were concerned that the hat was going to appear on his head. It was a serious discussion. And I was, like, ‘Wow! That really is pop culture.’ ”

A quick internet trawl reveals – incredibly – that this was, indeed, the explanation offered by US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates to Politico as the “primary reason” the photos were not released. So this must be the first time in recorded history that a hat has pierced the thinking of the Pentagon.

Princess Beatrice, perhaps having watched her mother weather various media storms, seems to have handled herself impeccably, raising a record £81,000 for charity by auctioning the hat on eBay, and promptly wearing another (albeit more subdued) Treacy creation to Royal Ascot.

Does he think the columnists were particularly spiteful? A long pause. “I think they can be a bit unnecessarily mean sometimes – you know, talk about being judged – and I think people can join on a bandwagon. And, OK, it was unusual but, you know, there’s lots of talk about hats and the future of hats and it was A Modern Hat Statement. In 100 years’ time, people will look at it and think, ‘Wow! Who was she?’

“I believe in the survival of hats and a hat is a major communicator. Look what it did all over the world; it travelled all over the world! Hats are about a reaction – they think it’s funny, they think it’s ridiculous, they loved it, they hated it… But, you know, I hear about the hat all the time and it’s a bit boring.”

And so we move swiftly forward to his past. I read out something he once said which made an impression on me: “When I started in fashion, I saw how it could be in that environment and I chose how not to be. My background is my safety net.”

Treacy grew up, one of seven brothers and a sister, in a tiny village of 500 people, Ahascragh in East Galway, in the west of Ireland. Every Sunday, the family went to church where Treacy was a choirboy. When I ask him to sing something for me, he blushes like crazy and says: “Oh, I couldn’t – it would freak me out!” How strong is his Catholic faith now? “It’s always within me,” he says.

His father was a baker, who died of a heart attack when Treacy was 11, and his mother a housewife who was one of the few women in the village to wear a hat. “One of my strongest memories is of watching her at the mirror adjusting her hat. She never just threw it on, she placed it and angled it. How she wore it was everything,” he has said.

So does Treacy believe that he was the only gay in the village? He laughs: “I’m sure not, but… It wasn’t, you know, a pathetic scenario because I didn’t see what the problem was. This was how I felt naturally and I was just different.”

From a young age, he was always making things – Christmas decorations, cushion covers and rugs. When he was 6, he asked his teacher whether he could join the girls who were sewing: “I always remember her expression [startled eyes] and it could have gone either way. But she said, ‘Yes,’ and taught me how to sew and I remember her being really entertained by the fact that I could do it, and then she taught all the boys to sew.”

Other men in the village would make concerned comments to Treacy’s father about his boy, who was forever embroidering and crocheting, but Mr Treacy’s response was always: “Well, whatever makes him happy.” As his son says now, “My father could have said, ‘Under no circumstances is he allowed to sew,’ but he really did want me to be happy.” Was his father creative himself? “Oh yes, he was a brilliant gardener and really tasteful.” Did he have a feminine side? “Not at all. He was very, you know, Man.”

In 1985, Treacy moved to Dublin to study fashion at the National College of Art and Design. It was there that he made his first hat from an old straw boater that he’d found in a junk shop, taking it apart and remodelling it into a matador shape. When he told his tutor, Jill Hewitt, about it, she asked to see the hat and promptly bought it.

For his work experience, he spent six weeks in the studio of Stephen Jones, at the time the hottest British hat designer, before moving to London full-time to do an MA in fashion at the Royal College of Art, where he was the guinea pig for their first hat course, and graduated with a first.

While still a student, he took a hat to show Michael Roberts, Tatler’s fashion director, and the magazine’s style editor, Issy Blow, who was instantly blown away. Six months later, she commissioned Treacy to design a headdress for her wedding and when he graduated from the RCA, generously invited him to set up a workshop in the basement of the Belgravia home she shared with her husband, Detmar, and the model Susie Bick.

Blow continued to champion her protégé, taking him to meet Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, where Treacy worked for ten years. The first “proper” hat he designed himself was the Twisted Birdcage worn by Linda Evangelista on the cover of Vogue. At his first fashion show in 1993, at Harvey Nichols, Naomi, Yasmin, Kate, Stella and Christy all worked for free in exchange for hats. The next year, he set up shop in Elizabeth Street, Belgravia, whence he went on to win British Accessory Designer of the Year five times and become today’s must-have milliner to the rich and famous.

So, OK, Philip, dish the dirt. Who’s the biggest nightmare? Sadly, he’s not about to bite the hands that feed him but he does spill the beans about Mask Wars. He had made a white mask for Lady Gaga and a black one for Grace Jones. As he says: “I only have one pair of hands and that’s the look that’s going on at the moment, but these ladies get a little possessive about my things on them.”

He had been touring with Jones for a year as the art director of her show and she was to be performing at Elton John’s Oscar party, “and Grace sent me a text saying, ‘Please tell me Lady Gaga copied my mask.’ It was the time that Alexander McQueen had killed himself and it took me a few days to think about it, and I wrote back: ‘I love you, Grace, but let’s get things in perspective. This is not the moment and also it’s my mask.’ ”

Was Gaga also sending you texts? “No, Miss Gaga [as he insists on calling her] didn’t know anything about it. Miss Gaga loves Grace Jones.”

In the event, after much discussion, Jones did wear the mask but – purely for Treacy’s benefit – strode on to the stage and said, “I just want to say something: I wore this first.” Gaga had worn her version a few weeks before at the Brits, “and because she was new and had won an award, she was, like, on every single newspaper around the world. But Grace was in Italy and I thought, ‘She’ll never see it.’ Little did I know that Inspector Clouseau was watching it on television.”

Treacy has his eccentricities (he was possibly overly attached to his late Jack Russell, Mr Pig, who slept in a Versace cashmere blanket and had his own VIP pass to the Design Museum), but he is also quite down-to-earth in other ways. He has been with his partner, Stefan Bartlett, eight years his junior, since they were introduced by Blow in 1997 when she was styling Treacy’s fashion show and Bartlett was working as her assistant. Bartlett is now Treacy’s business partner, as well as his life partner: “His talent is that he’s very stylish and he’s got great taste.” Fortunately, he too loves dogs, and the two men walk Mr Pig’s successors, Archie and TJ, every morning in Battersea Park.

The greasy spoon breakfast Treacy would enjoy on a daily basis at Victoria Coach Station’s caff, close to his old Elizabeth Street shop, has now been replaced by the taxi booth stand on Battersea Bridge. “I do so like a bacon roll – it’s just delicious in the morning.That’s luxury,” he says. “Everyone’s going on about luxury – but luxury is walking through Battersea Park in the morning with two dogs that you love and a bacon roll and a cup of tea and a chat and looking at all the newspapers in the booth.

“People are confused about what luxury is. This business I work in is fascinating but all these people are tripping over themselves to have a £20,000 handbag and I’m, like, ‘What?’ You know, it’s a marketing business; it’s a marketing industry.” He sounds like he’s got his head screwed on. “Well, I see it for what it is.”

Good manners are important to him and he singles out David Beckham and Kate Moss, among his huge list of VIP clients, as being “so gentle and nice and unaffected by that level of fame. It’s easy to be amenable to people and it’s also easy to be an asshole.”

There are other high-flyers in his industry who have come crashing down, without Treacy’s “safety net”, such as John Galliano, whom Treacy has worked with but does not count as a friend: “Unlike Alexander and Isabella, who were real friends and very real people, as well,” he says.

Blow tried half a dozen times to kill herself until her last successful attempt when she swallowed weedkiller. (Was this some sort of statement about how she felt her bloom had withered?) Treacy says that she had been trying to end her life for at least two years. She suffered from depression, then ovarian cancer, and felt sidelined by those, such as McQueen, whom she had mentored.

“Isabella was like a child,” Treacy says. “A very honest, open person – she would tell you some of the most personal details and you’d think, ‘I don’t believe she’s saying this!’ but it was because she felt like it. She was the funniest person you’ve ever met in your life. Hilarious.”

Treacy, in common with all the fashion guru’s friends, tried to talk Blow out of her commitment to kill herself: “But that’s what she wanted to do, which was heartbreaking and quite a difficult thing to process.”

He saw McQueen two years after Blow’s death; it was a few weeks before the designer took his own life. “And he said, ‘I feel like I have a death wish in me,’ and I just said, ‘Sorry? Don’t be ridiculous!’ Not thinking for a moment…”

They had been talking about Blow, “because we were like Isabella’s children. She invented us. I knew Isabella very well, and I knew Alexander well, and it’s like you’re reading about a different person sometimes because they weren’t quite like that. They weren’t tragic; in fact, they were the least tragic people I’ve ever met. [Although Isabella’s many suicide attempts sound pretty tragic to me.] Like, Amy Winehouse is now ‘tragic’ – but, you know, it wasn’t so long ago that they were laughing at her. And it’s the same for Isabella – they just thought ‘crazy Issy’ and now, of course, she’s ‘iconic’.”

McQueen seemed to have won the lottery, with success and worldly wealth, but he didn’t have anyone in his life with whom to share his good fortune. “No, he wanted it all but he didn’t get it…” Does Treacy feel lucky to have found love? “Of course. That’s why Stefan is my everything.”

Now, Philip, you used to say that Mr Pig was your everything.

“It’s true and Mr Pig did get a little tricky when Stefan came along. He adored Stefan, too, but he was a bit kind of… [pulls a concerned canine face].”

I wonder whether he and Stefan have talked about having children in their life, inspired perhaps by the example of Sir Elton John and David Furnish. “I’d love to,” he says, “but I don’t have Elton’s bank balance to accommodate nannies – at the moment.”

I would have thought you were quite well off? “Fashion is an illusion,” he says.

To which I can only think that he must have been giving away an awful lot of free hats to his celebrity clientele.

We were supposed to have been discussing his new collaboration with Slendertone for whom he has designed the Philip Treacy for Slendertone Face headset – which looks like a sleek pair of cherry red headphones, and will “gently lift and tone” your flagging facial muscles. He hasn’t personally tried them yet, “but I would like to because, you know, as you get older…” and he does approve of “the Slendertone thing because it’s painless and it’s something you can plug in”.

In fact, he finds it quite difficult sometimes working in an industry in which he is constantly confronted with “the ultimate beauties, where, you know, you are dealing in perfection. But models are freaks of nature and fashion is an illusion. Nobody actually looks like that or has skin that looks like that. We’re all doing the best we can with what we’ve been given.”

He is very much part of the Slendertone anti-Botox and surgical intervention philosophy: “It’s like an alien race is being created, which might sound racist in the future when we have ‘the plastic surgery people’. Sometimes when you see somebody, you think, ‘What did they do? Do they see in the mirror what they look like?’ I don’t think it makes the person more attractive and I think ‘character’ is more interesting.”

He likes characters such as Lady Gaga who he says is both fun and funny. The idea of her becoming an intern at Treacy’s studio – which is a joke – came on the back of an ongoing discussion the two have been having about the future of fashion.

“She’s an entourage person and she travels with a crew of people who are making up clothes in the back of the van or something like that,” he says. “And, you know, everyone’s a designer today… So we were laughing about the futuristic idea of celebrities making their own clothes for the Oscars: Angelina Jolie hand-sequining her dress at home the night before… DIY total control!”

To me, his hats are dazzlingly inventive sculptures which look brilliant on the page and above the razored cheek bones of the “freaks of nature”. Camilla Parker Bowles on her wedding day also proved that you don’t have to be a conventional beauty to carry off a Treacy, but it helps.

I must say that I rather love the idea of a collaboration between Lady Gaga and Philip Treacy. If it ever happens, there will be no need for Dalí-esque mock-ups on the internet because their millinery offspring would be beyond surreal. As Treacy says, “I don’t like old hat, I like new hat. I’ve been offered a fantastic opportunity to influence how people see hats in the 21st century and it’s fecking exciting!”

The Times