KEY POINTS:
These days every fashion designer, artist, musician and their carefully trimmed poodle has a muse. And these muses tend to be good looking models, well-dressed friends of friends, debauched rock stars, or even long-dead historical figures.
"These days every idiot has a muse," lamented hatmaker-to-the-stars (and the best designers in the world), Philip Treacy, in Auckland last week.
"You know, there are hundreds of them," the most famous milliner in the world confides in his gentle Irish brogue. "But they're not real muses."
Treacy was in the country to promote the gala opening of an exhibition of his hats in Wellington and the conversation had, quite naturally, turned to his own muse, recently deceased British stylist Isabella Blow. But rather than being some sort of morbid fascination with the fashion icon who died several months ago when she reportedly drank weedkiller after long bouts with depression and treatment for cancer, the conversational turn was quite natural.
After all, the Design Museum exhibition, which has been touring the world since 2003 and which is making its second-to-last stop in New Zealand, is called When Philip Met Isabella and features a range of the rather incredible hats that Treacy made specifically for Blow, a mentor and a muse to him and probably one of the only women in the world who could - or would - carry off an otherworldly Treacy hat."What I loved about Isabella was the way she wore hats," Treacy says, "It was like she wasn't really wearing a hat at all."
True, if you see pictures of Blow in British social pages she might be laughing, drinking or chatting - but all with a castle or flying saucer on her head or what looks like butterfly wings wrapped around one eye.
"One time she had gone to LA to work with David LaChapelle and a friend of mine went to pick her up from her hotel at 11 o'clock in the morning," Treacy recalls. "And he told me she was really kind of confused because all these people kept coming up to her and asking her, 'Where's the partay?'," Treacy drawls in a made-up American accent. "They all thought she was going to a party because she was so dressed up at that time of the morning. And she was like, 'What party? Where?'."
When Treacy first met Blow in 1989, she was a British aristocrat with an idiosyncratic personal style and an ability to spot fashion talent, working at Tatler magazine. And when one of Treacy's hats passed her way, she was so enamoured of the then fashion student's headgear she contacted him and commissioned a hat herself.
"To be honest," recalls Treacy, a baker's son who started off by dissecting old hats he found at the fleamarkets in County Galway, Ireland, where he grew up, "at first I didn't know what to make of the whole experience. I was a student at the Royal College [of Art in London] and [at Tatler] they were doing a story called The Green Hat [but] they couldn't find a green hat so I made one. And when I went back to collect the hat that was when I met Isabella for the first time."
Around the same time Treacy won a competition to make Ascot hats in the millinery department of Harrod's department store over his summer holidays. "And at the college there was a temp, a young girl working on the switchboard, there. And every few days she would say to me, 'This woman has been on the telephone wanting to know what your schedule is like for the next six months'," Treacy remembers. "And I'd say, but I don't understand what that means, what schedule is she talking about?" he laughs.
Eventually Treacy did return Blow's phone call. "It turned out that she was getting married and she wanted a hat!"
Treacy went on to create a wimple-inspired hat for Blow's wedding that perfectly matched her medieval purple frock and Blow went on to install the recent graduate in the basement of her Belgravia, London home, where he started his business. Besides becoming his most daring customer, she also introduced him to designers like Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel; Treacy was just 23 at the time.
And the rest, as anyone who likes to put outrageous things on their head knows, is history.
Treacy's hats have since overshadowed some of the most famous faces in the world and he even made hats for Prince Charles' wedding to Camilla Parker-Bowles. He has also gone on to work with the best designers in the world. In fact a couple of weeks ago, shortly before he flew to New Zealand, Treacy collaborated with Alexander McQueen on that designer's show at Paris Fashion Week - the collection was a tribute to Blow, who also mentored McQueen and others like designer Julien MacDonald and model Sophie Dahl.
And now, although Treacy says the hat-wearing public going to the church opposite his childhood home were some of "the best fashion shows I ever saw", names like Gianni Versace, Dolce and Gabbana, Givenchy, Helmut Lang and Ralph Lauren are a regular part of Treacy's career and his conversation.
"Most people would imagine Karl Lagerfeld to be a very kind of uptight, Germanic sort of designer," Treacy says. "But he's not like that at all, he's actually a bit of a dude," the down-to-earth milliner chortles. "He's definitely not sitting at home worrying about his Chanel buttons. I'd go and work for him and say, 'So, Karl, what would you like?' And he'd say 'Let's do clouds' and I'd go 'Okay' and it wouldn't be a big deal. And then," Treacy warms to the topic, "he'd present one of the most famous supermodels to you, and there'd be all these people standing around, and he'd say, 'So, Philip, what do you think? And I'd go, 'What? You mean, like now?'."
Over the years, besides having come to lots of conclusions about the meaning of design, how the democratisation of fashion encourages personal style and how passion for what you do and what you create is the most important thing, Treacy has also figured out a few things about fame. After all, as he so rightly says, he does know a lot of very famous people.
"But what nobody actually explains to anybody is that it's not that much fun," he exclaims. "In fact it can be hell. But that celeb-a-loola thing, that's worldwide at the moment. And I believe it's creating a sort of vacuousness that's really distasteful. It's becoming a bit of a freak show."
Treacy, whose business is still fairly small but who, as one of the best milliners in the world, can choose with whom he works, doesn't care for celebrities who expect him to furnish them with his headgear for free.
"Actually," he continues, "I always remember doing a lecture in Milan. Isabella and I were on a panel for Italian Vogue, there were people like Donna Karan and Milla Jovovich with us. And these students in the audience had said to Milla, 'How do we get our clothes worn by celebrities?' And Milla had said, 'Well, you could send me your clothes', and I was thinking, please don't tell them to do that because they cannot afford to [send you their clothes]. And Isabella just grabbed the microphone and said, 'All celebrities should be put in the bin'. Milla was a little upset with us after that. But that," Treacy laughs, "is what I call straightforward."
When Treacy, dandily dressed, quick witted and genial, talks about Blow occasionally there's a sad tinge underlying some of his funny stories. But on the whole you get more of a feeling of resignation at his muse's fate. It's almost like she was so bold and such a wilful eccentric, that a flamboyantly horrible demise, while it would never have been welcomed nor expected, seems to have been accepted by Blow's friends and admirers.
But there's also no doubt that, in an age when any old muse will do for most, he misses her badly.
"Isabella was a particularly good muse because she didn't interfere," Treacy says. "She would never interfere, she would never say 'Oh, can you make it a bit more like that'."
What she did do was inspire.
"I remember she bought this book to me by a French writer called Olivier Bernier called Pleasure And Privilege about life in France in the 1770s."
In one chapter about fashions of the age, Treacy read how, after the French admiralty had defeated the British navy in a sea battle, wealthy Parisians wore miniature ships in their hair in celebration. "And I always thought it was a costume designer's fantasy," Treacy notes. "But apparently at a particular moment in time people really did wear ships in their hair to places like the opera, to celebrate winning this battle. And what I loved about it was that it wasn't a joke, it wasn't ridiculous. It was like wearing the latest kind of Gucci jeans. It was the hippest thing!"
The eventual result: a hat for Blow featuring a miniature replica of an 18th century ship complete with full rigging made from miniature buttons.
Along with the feathered hat Blow was buried in, The Ship, which is on display in New Zealand, would become one of her favourites. The hat sat on top of Blow's casket at her funeral in May earlier this year, before being returned to the exhibition.
"I've got a woman who works in my shop in London who told me that people are buying a dream when they come into the store. They don't really need [this hat] but they want it. For me, it's great to make something that people want badly - and the person who always wanted it the most was Isabella," Treacy says. "You know, people say, 'Oh I went into town and I saw a nice dress'. Not Isabella. She didn't see a nice dress, she saw a dress she wanted badly. Now. But not in a stupid way, more in a that's-the-most-beautiful-thing-in-the-world way. It would make her day.
"My whole relationship with Isabella revolved around her expectations of me," Treacy says, more serious now. "The passion that she instilled in you to make something for her," he pauses, "it was like she totally believed you were going to make something fantastic. And sometimes you'd think, f***, she's expecting a lot. But in a way you didn't want to let her down. She wasn't interested in a little pillbox [hat] with a flower hanging off the back of it, she wanted the opposite of that. So I think it is that combination of freedom and the constraint of her expectation that whips you into shape and completely freaks you out - but in other ways that was the magic of the whole experience."
* When Philip Met Isabella: Philip Treacy's Hats for Isabella Blow is on at the Dowse Museum in Lower Hutt until February 3, 2008, www.dowse.org.nz
