Belgravia isn’t a London neighbourhood traditionally thought of as a creative hub. It’s better known for its abundance of embassies, plush hotels and tony rows of townhouses owned by non-dom plutocrats. Counter to its current reputation, however, is the fact that for 34 years it has been home to one of British, in fact global, fashion history’s defining figures: Philip Treacy OBE.

His base on Elizabeth Street comprises a narrow first-floor shop space with gilt walls, lined with busts holding the master milliner’s sculptural wares, and a basement atelier below. Treacy, 57, has irrefutably shaped our visual culture. Even if you didn’t know his name first-hand, if you’ve found your way here you’ll have seen the fruits of Treacy’s labour countless times: atop the heads of Lady Gaga, Queen Camilla, Madonna, Princess Beatrice and Grace Jones; as the crowning glories of Karl Lagerfeld’s collections for Chanel throughout the ’90s; in Demna’s Balenciaga couture debut; and, of course, through his long-standing creative partnerships with the late Isabella Blow and Alexander McQueen.

This prolific history has made his shop and studio a site of pilgrimage for anyone in pursuit of the finest headgear. “We’re a destination store. It’s on their itinerary when they come to London from all over the world. Americans, Saudis, Caribbean people, Nigerians…,” says Treacy, who’s standing in his atelier. A veritable Aladdin’s cave, the shelves are lined with hand- carved head busts perched alongside a menagerie of sculptural objects so extraordinary that it almost feels reductive to just call them ‘hats’: among these, I see a UFO-shaped piece in rose buckram with floral arrangements peeking beneath the brim and a dainty grey fascinator pinned with a corkscrew twizzle of fabric. “We also have a lot of English customers. Hats are a part of every culture, but English people have a different sensibility for hats to other cultures. The English think my hats are normal,” he says with a chuckle, picking up the latter piece. “It’s a testament to English eccentricity – they’re open to something different, they’re not regimented.” While it may no longer be the case, when Treacy first arrived in Belgravia in the late ’80s, that was a truth which made itself felt in the neighbourhood’s streets. “It was very different. It was like a sleepy village with nothing going on, but it had its quirks. There was a greengrocer who sold dodgy fruit and a fish shop that I understood later was a brothel, but there were also quite a few aristocratic eccentrics around.”

It was on account of one of them that Treacy moved to the area in the first place. His first base here was just next door: it was the former home of Blow – Treacy’s greatest pillar of support over the course of his career, not to mention one of his greatest friendships – who lived there with McQueen.

Treacy was raised in Ahascragh, a rural Irish village with about 500 inhabitants in County Galway, and exhibited an instinct for fashion from an early age. His earliest recollections can be traced back to the spectacles of the weddings that regularly took place at the church opposite his childhood home. “The first time I saw one, I just thought, ‘Wow, what’s going on?’ Seeing this beautiful dress, the people dressed up and that sense of occasion, it really inspired me.”

It didn’t take long for inspiration to translate to action, with Treacy first trying his hand at making clothes at the ripe age of six. “It was before I’d gained any inhibitions. I’d noticed that, at a certain point in the day, the boys went off and the girls stayed and did sewing. I thought, ‘I want to sew!’, so I just asked the teacher if I could in front of everybody. I remember seeing her expression, but fortunately she was entertained by the idea. And so she taught me. I then started making clothes for the dolls that belonged to my sister, who had left for London. I was making bust points before I’d heard the term and designing clothes before I knew what design was.”

In his teen years, a chance mention of an art foundation course in Galway by a secondary school art teacher led him to apply. A year later, upon completing it, he earned a place on the fashion course at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. It was there that hat-making came into the equation, “at first just to go with clothes,” he says. “At the time, nobody was that interested in hats, so it was all very DIY,” with early millinery experiments including using second-hand felt hats sourced from charity shops.

Graduating in 1987, Treacy headed straight for London, where he undertook work experience placements with Zandra Rhodes and Stephen Jones, who by then was already renowned as one of the greatest milliners of his generation. It was at the Royal College of Art, however, where Treacy’s inimitable formal language as a hatmaker began to truly take shape. Though he’d enrolled on the course as a fashion designer, millinery quickly became his creative focus. “The Royal College were thinking of setting up a hat course and I was their guinea pig,” he says. “In our first year, they set up a competition with Harrods, in which all the students on the course had to make a hat, and I made this black felt hat with piano keys on it. It won and I even remember being in the canteen at the Royal College and seeing a woman on TV who was wearing it to the races!”

This victory opened the door to a sequence of events that laid the groundwork for the illustrious career he has built since. Though he was still just a first-year student, in 1989 Harrods invited him to create a winter collection of hats, which he designed and produced in the Royal College of Art’s studios over the summer break. Michael Roberts, then the style director of Tatler, also came calling, commissioning Treacy to create a piece for an editorial. Notably, this was Treacy’s introduction to the woman who would play a crucial role in bringing his work to the world: Isabella Blow.

“I remember going to the Condé Nast offices, where Tatler was based, to collect the hat. The look in the offices at Tatler and Vogue at that time was a navy suit with a white blouse and pearls,” Treacy recalls with bemusement. There was one notable exception. “This person walked into the room and she was the only person in the building wearing fashion,” he says with a gasp. “She had on a transparent cobwebby top by John Galliano, a black satiny shirt and little yellow Manolo Blahnik shoes. And her lipstick was all over her face, too. It was really weird, because nobody dressed like that. She was so cool.”

Blow thought similarly of Treacy. “While I was at the RCA, supplying Harrods’ hat department, there was a young girl temping during the summer. Every time I’d come back in from buying some materials, she’d say, ‘Some lady keeps calling for you and she wants to know what your schedule is like for the next six months.’” The rest is well-documented history. A commission to create a headdress for Blow’s Gloucestershire wedding – gold with an in-built crown – cemented the pair’s friendship, with Blow taking Treacy under her wing. Insisting that the burgeoning hatmaker install himself in the basement of her Belgravia home, the editor and socialite became an ardent ambassador for his work, sporting hoods made from chain-linked coins, giant satin halos and elaborate plumed confections on her regular nights out. “I wasn’t really one for going out, but she was very social. She’d come home from the office, get changed and then come down the stairs to ask what to wear that night,” Treacy says. “I’d pick a hat for her and then she’d come back around 11 or midnight, saying that the ‘hat had had the most incredible dance!’

“You couldn’t not inspired by her, because the hat that nobody understood, she understood,” he continues. “It allowed me to start making what I felt like making, which was too freaky for most customers. But the hats that I loved, Isabella loved too.”

More than simply wearing his pieces, Blow made a point of making Treacy’s name known to the fashion industry’s leading figures, brokering some of his most important collaborative relationships. At a party toasting the Royal College of Art in 1991, for example, “Isabella took my hand, sidestepped all the people there in a really obvious way and then just presented me to Karl Lagerfeld,” he recalls of an introduction that eventually led to Treacy and Lagerfeld’s 10-year long collaboration at Chanel. “He was stood there with his fan and she just said, ‘Karl, this is Philip and he makes beautiful things.’ I didn’t know what to say, but she introduced me like she was doing Karl a favour. That was her sensibility.”

Arguably, the most vital creative relationship that Blow established for the milliner was with McQueen. They were introduced at her home, where Treacy now resided, in 1992 almost immediately after McQueen had showcased his now-canonised graduate collection from Central Saint Martins at London Fashion Week. “She returned from it and exclaimed, ‘I’ve discovered this remarkable young man!’ and promptly brought him over. He had the garments in bin liners, but she truly adored them. She insisted that we work together – she gave me no choice, she just said, ‘You have to!’,” Treacy says with a laugh, recounting how McQueen was added to a roster of clients that already included Chanel, Valentino and Blumarine.

The creative relationship between Treacy and McQueen is widely acknowledged as one of the most productive and era-defining in fashion history. Indeed, think of a legendary McQueen look and there’s an outsized chance that Treacy’s creative ingenuity was a key part of its impact. The twirled golden horns sported by Naomi Campbell in his SS97 Givenchy haute couture show; the veiled antlers from The Widows of Culloden, McQueen’s AW06 collection for his namesake house; the peacock-like, skeletal bird headpiece for his AW08 collection, Sarabande.

Somewhat surprisingly, however, their collaboration was rarely direct, with Treacy typically revealing his pieces to McQueen late in the day. “Weirdly enough, we’d arrive about two hours before the show and, often, Alexander didn’t know what he was getting. There wasn’t a possibility of disappointing him. You couldn’t just turn up with something crappy, because he and his clothes were fabulous to work with. We were working with power – powerful clothes complemented by powerful hats, which isn’t the case for most designers. It was fucking difficult, but it was part of the fun.”

Of course, he didn’t create without any guidance. Katy England, McQueen’s career-long stylist, right-hand woman and a long-standing collaborator of Treacy’s, served as a constant touchpoint throughout the process. “Working as a conduit between those two creatives was the best job in the world,” she tells me. “Lee trusted Philip to come up with something for his shows that would delight him and complete his own creative vision.

“My job was to take Philip our initial research for the show and then relay his thoughts back to Lee,” she says, elaborating on the mechanics of their shared process. “As the show drew closer, I would take him fabric swatches, sketches, maybe fitting pictures of the particular looks he was designing a hat for, and then listen to his ideas and process. I tried to keep what Philip was doing a bit of a secret from Lee and vice versa, as I wanted them both to have something to look forward to. I knew that when Philip unveiled the hats, literally backstage at the show, this would be the first time Lee had ever seen them, and he would always be so completely amazed and overjoyed. Placing the hat on the finished look was an incredibly special moment to witness between them.”

While this two-decade-long relationship brought about some of Treacy’s best-known creations, his work beyond it is just as powerful a testament to the calibre of his craft. He has played a crucial role in shaping the visual identities of some of the world’s most directional dressers, among them Grace Jones, who arrived at the designer’s SS01 show for London Fashion Week sporting his crumpled gold top hat, then stood on the top of her limousine. And, of course, Lady Gaga has been an avid champion of Treacy’s since 2009. She most recently showcased a piece from his AW01 show, famously worn by Blow, at the Venice Film Festival. On the flipside of these decidedly outré fashion icons, he’s also earned a reputation as the go-to hatmaker for members of the royal family, with HRH Queen Camilla and Catherine, Princess of Wales, regularly seen in the milliner’s more typically ladylike confections at some of their official appearances.

Indeed, Treacy’s overstuffed roster of endorsements over three and a half decades of his creative practice is almost baffling in its versatility. “Ralph Lauren, Gianni Versace, Giorgio Armani, Karl Lagerfeld, Alexander McQueen… I’ve really had the chance to work with the kings of fashion.” Still, even after so long working with fashion – and real – royalty, what keeps him going is a humble commitment to his craft and a faith in its transformative capacity. “I’m a craftsperson at heart,” he says. “And I have huge respect for the craft of hat-making. What I do, it’s about creating desire, creating something that somebody didn’t know they wanted, and that’s always tailored to the personality of the person I’m designing for. That’s my greatest inspiration. Whether it’s Gaga or a mum going to a wedding, I’m responsible to that person. Especially if it’s the mum going to a wedding, actually – maybe that’s the only hat they’ll ever buy and they’re going to be looking at that picture for the rest of their lives. I want them to be thrilled.”

Perhaps the most compelling testament to Treacy’s success in his mission can be found on the walls of his Belgravia store. Nestled among the photographs of the likes of Naomi Campbell and Isabella Blow wearing his designs is a handwritten note, lovingly placed in an ornate gilt frame. Penned by Elizabeth Taylor, it exalts the milliner as an “amazing creator of hats! Dreamer of dreams… Making our dreams come true… For that, we thank you forever.” It’s a sentiment no doubt shared by anyone who makes the pilgrimage to 69 Elizabeth Street.

Taken from 10+ UK Issue 7 – DECADENCE, MORE, PLEASURE – on newsstands Dec 6.

@10magazineaustralia

PHILIP TREACY: DREAMER OF DREAMS

Photographer HARRIET MACSWEEN
Fashion Editor SOPHIA NEOPHITOU
Text MAHORO SEWARD
Model ADOT GAK at The Hive Management
Make-up ANNA PAYNE at C/O Management using CHANEL Fall-Winter 2024 Make-up Collection and No.1 de CHANEL skincare range
Manicurist HAYLEY EVANS-SMITH at Saint Luke
Digital operator CHARLOTTE HARTLEY
Photographer’s assistant KEIR LAIRD
Fashion assistants GEORGIA EDWARDS and KEZ KABONGO
Make-up assistant TAMSIN BALLINGALL
Production ZAC APOSTOLOU and SONYA MAZURYK
Retouching JON OLIVER STUDIO

Special thanks to PHILIP TREACY, DAWN MASON and HANNA LEVY

Hats throughout by PHILIP TREACY