How a hat makes you feel is what a hat is all about.
Philip Treacy
Royalty is completely different than celebrity. Royalty has a magic all its own.
Everybody loves things that sparkle.
The personality of the wearer and the hat makes the hat.
Elegance is all in the mind of the wearer.
Wearing a hat is fun; people have a good time when they're wearing a hat.
A person carries off the hat. Hats are about emotion. It is all about how it makes you feel.
I am very proud to be Irish.
My aim is to change people's perceptions of what a hat can look like in the 21st century.
Hats make people feel good, and that's the point of them.
I remember in the early nineties people saying the hat was just for old women, but that's ridiculous.
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.
There's a technicality to designing and wearing hats. A hat is balancing the proportions of your face; it's like architecture or mathematics.
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.
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.
Gaga is an entertainer, so a hat for her is part of the illusion of entertaining.
Shopping can be a nightmare - first finding something to wear and then finding something to go with it, it's so difficult when there's so much choice. It can feel like entering a battleground.
Hats are radical; only people that wear hats understand that.
Somebody can feel elegant without being elegant. It's a personality.
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.
I'm representative of 21st century Irish design, so I promote Irishness all over the world wherever I go.
I make hats for lots of iconic people, and that makes my job very interesting.
Certainly, people like Gaga have introduced a new type of hat-wearing.
I believe that I am a hat designer, not a milliner.
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 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.
I always design the hat with the wearer in mind; otherwise, it's an inanimate object.
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.
You always see a better side of where you're visiting when a local shows you around.
I like hats that make the heart beat faster.
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.
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 must point out - Sarah Jessica Parker is not a diva - she's one of these pop culture characters that everybody likes.
When people think of hats, they think of her majesty the queen.
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.
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.
When you meet someone, you meet their face. It's the most potent part of the body to embellish.
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.
America brought us the baseball cap; it's one of my favorite hats.
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.
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.
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.
Try on 100 different hats if you can, until you find the one that suits you best. It's a trial and error thing.
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.
