Hats seemed to be the thing that nobody else was doing.
They just seemed to be somehow a very strong point of view - it was quite in your face to the other person
I'm looking the way I am and if you don't like it, bugger off.
There was a solid group of creative people in London who were starting off new trends.
And when punk evaporated there was a vacuum which was left behind
which was filled by new wave and very quickly new romantics afterwards.
I was just living from one day til the next - I didn't really have any great plans.
The fact that I'd been able to open a shop within a year of leaving college was amazing to me.
Selling my first hat - it was great - opening up a shop.
It was amazing getting a first magazine cover.
Being in Boy George's 'Do You Really Want To Hurt Me' video
Jean-Paul Gaultier saw that ... and a whole series of things
Still those things happen all the time - I'm sure it was a whole sequence of events.
But none of it was pre-meditated
I was making hats for Steve Strange and Spandau Ballet and people like that.
Then I had a phone call one day from Anna Harvey who worked on Vogue magazine
and they were coordinating a wardrobe for the Princess of Wales
and I made quite a few hats for her early on.
When you're making a hat for a client you have to be a good listener.
You have to find out why they're wearing the hat, what they want to achieve,
really what's going through their mind in exactly the same way that you do with a designer client.
There's no difference at all.
The millinery business was a bigger employer than the clothing business in 1880.
If you want to have a hard core hat done, you do it here.
They do it at Philip Treacy, they do it at Alberto Sueno New York,
they do it at Maison Michelle in Paris - ten places in the world, that's it.
I'm only as good as the milliners who work with me. Each of them have a totally different character.
When I'm designing something, often I will think 'That'll be great because Mizuni can make that'
or I will think that Haniko can make that or Craig can make that.
And I will slightly design it around them and my understanding of them.
I've been here for 25 years - I was the first official employee.
It starts with Stephen designing a collection, we then go through the sketches together
and we discuss how the hats are going to be made.
It's trying to find ways of working with different materials that wouldn't traditionally be used.
So that's quite a challenge.
In millinery it's slightly different to making clothes - it's not working flat,
so it's more like sculpture because everything we're working on is 3-dimensional.
When you're doing a hat you sew the thing together but the steam is what makes it millinery.
You can shape things and manipulate them, even by pressing the steam
or by steaming with the steamer, then you've got a hat.
Various things - we have blocks made, so it's like a shoemaker's last
If you're making a soft hat you can then just steam it into shape
and put it on a poupée which is just a head shape.
This hat was born purely of technique because we found a plastic - this very glass-like, transparent plastic.
What we did was bought one of these paint strippers.
Actually We did have to work out this sort of ballet, almost, of ...
that person had to pull it like that ... because of course it gets very very hot.
We had four different people with pliers holding onto this, twisting it in every direction.
I start to sketch at 6 in the morning - that's when I'll think about things.
The key to it is having nothing on your mind. Your first thought of the morning is somehow your best.
At that time in the morning your eyes aren't working anyway so you can't see what you're doing.
That great terror of the blank piece of white paper just somehow isn't there for me.
This particular collection was inspired by the archives within the V&A.
We realised after a while that it wasn't going to be this great academic treatise on millinery throughout the ages.
It's just my personal take on it. It's really the life cycle of the hat
through inspiration, creation, the salon and the client.
This is from the 40s and the print is by Dalí.
This other little hat here, this blue hat which looks quite unassuming -
this is from Dior's Spring 1948 collection which was the first Spring collection that he did.
This is Julie Andrews' hat from My Fair Lady. She was in the stage production of My Fair Lady.
Each hat in the exhibition, whether it is from the 20th century - as these hats are -
or the 15th century or hats which are contemporary, all tell a specific story.
I have made two collections based on the research at the V&A.
The first one is called Vanda and that's for 2009 and
these were the research pictures taken of this Wonderful cap in the V&A archives.
This dates from about 1830.
When you have something that it so sophisticated like a satin, it's cream and it's luxurious -
all this technique - I love to cut through that with something as simple as cane for making chairs out of.
I love this. I love the shape of it. It's one of my favourite hats and certainly my favourite in this collection.
I think designers need the milliner because we can express what the fashion designers can't.
And we can do it in a much more light hearted way.
If you put that sort of information into clothing, it looks like costume.
It's extraordinary that I can work with all these different designers
who accept the fact that I work with other people.
It is great to work with Marc Jacobs and John Galliano and Rei Kawakubo and Giles Deacon.
They're all very, very different people.
Almost all hats are surrealist. I think there's very few hats that aren't.
There's something about putting something on your head immediately puts it in a different dimension.
The purpose of hat wearing now is completely different.
It was about etiquette and conformity, but I think that really that stopped in the 80s.
And hats as entertainment and a thing of fashion
which is in fact what they always were anyway, that became more important.
I was listening to this programme once on the radio and Malcolm McLaren was pointing out
how frighteningly small the alphabet of fashion was and in fact millinery is its punctuation.
We provide the apostrophes, the question marks, the exclamation marks.