PHILIP TREACY GOES WHERE NO HAT DESIGNER HAS GONE

The most outrageous hat maker on the planet has an exhibit at the Cranbrook Art Museum called “When Philip Met Isabella – Philip Treacy’s Hats for Isabella Blow.”

The exhibit features Blow’s personal collection of 30 Treacy hats including “Ship” – a replica of an 18th-century French ship with full rigging made from miniature buttons – and “Gilbert and George,” a pink and green head piece with lacquered ostrich feathers named after two influential British photographers.

Also featured is “Castle,” inspired by Ludwig of Bavaria’s palace and Blow’s ancestral home in Cheshire, England; and “Horns,” a black satin replica of the horns of Blow’s flock of ancient Soays sheep. Photographs by Steven Meisel, David LaChapelle, Juergen Teller and one by Mario Testino of Isabella Blow wearing a Treacy’s hat are also on display. Isabella Blow is Treacy’s muse with ties to Vogue Magazine, Visionaire and the Face. If you need creative inspiration or just a hat fix, check out the exhibit that runs from June 3rd until August 27th. Cranbrook is located one hour outside of Detroit, Michigan.

Born in County Galway, Ireland, Philip Treacy studied fashion design in Dublin before studying at the Royal College of Art. In addition to his own hat business, he has made haute couture hats for Chanel, Valentino, Gianni Versace and Alexander McQueen.

For more information on When Philip Met Isabella: Philip Treacy’s Hats for Isabella Blow, call 877.GO.CRANBrook or visit www.cranbrookart.edu/museum.

This is what the Sunday New York Times had to say about the Treacy Exhibit:

POSSESSED
One Moment, Please
By DAVID COLMAN

THE word timeless is kicked around with such abandon in style circles nowadays that it has become almost as meaningless as time itself. Like timeless is such a good thing anyway. If so much of life involves anticipating and recalling memorable moments, isn't timelessness kind of beside the point?

One would fully expect Philip Treacy to take such a view. Mr. Treacy, the world's foremost milliner, has created an eye-popping parade of ephemeral objects d'art. The only trait they share with conventional hats is that they are all designed to be worn on the head.

Many of the one-of-a-kind pieces Mr. Treacy created for the socialite Isabella Blow are now on display in "When Philip Met Isabella," an exhibition that opened this month at the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. But he himself does not believe his hats really spring to life until they are atop their wearer, en route to a date, a gala, a wedding. (No one, except possibly Ms. Blow, ever wore a Philip Treacy hat to go grocery shopping). After the event, the hat is no longer a hat, but a pressed flower, an index card to a memory.

"The combination of the person and the hat makes the hat magic," Mr. Treacy said. "I like things that exist for a moment, and that their moment is still attached to them." He recalled a fond moment: seeing, at an auction of the effects of the Duchess of Windsor, a small box wrapped in brown paper and done up neatly with string; inside was a piece of her wedding cake. Nowhere is this urge to encapsulate manifested more strikingly than in the 19th-century glass domes and bell jars he has been buying for several years.

For Mr. Treacy, the domes function on a practical level, as they did more than a century ago when they were a common sight, encasing and spotlighting the exotic fetishes — fragile clocks, bizarre insects, extraordinary minerals — of Victorian homeowners. "They're the most perfect things for hats," he said. "They're the most beautiful shapes, and they don't really make them anymore."

Of the dozen or so domes he owns, one houses an object more happily than the rest. It is a painstakingly detailed papier-mâché figure of Louis XIV that he ran across in Harrods. "I was going up an escalator when I saw it, and I thought, 'That's mine, whatever the price.' " Luckily the price was only £100.

The figure's glamour is not in its kingly bearing but rather, as one might say of Marie Antoinette, in the execution. "When you make things, and your work is about detail," Mr. Treacy explained, "you notice when something is extraordinary and perfect. And all made of paper!"

Under the dome, the 25-inch-high paper king is ennobled in a way he never would be in the open, subject to the ravages of time. Behind glass, he is untouchable. "It's like a tomb," Mr. Treacy said.

As practical as glass domes are, they may serve even better on a metaphoric level. "It's like a whole world trapped under there," he said. "They create a kind of space that seems lost in time."

So what if he creates the most exalted ways to say carpe diem? What good is seizing the day if you can't capture and keep it forever, like a fly in amber or a memory under glass?

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