I remember in the early nineties people saying the hat was just for old women, but that's ridiculous.
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.
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.
I'm representative of 21st century Irish design, so I promote Irishness all over the world wherever I go.
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.
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.
America brought us the baseball cap; it's one of my favorite hats.
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 believe that I am a hat designer, not a milliner.
I always design the hat with the wearer in mind; otherwise, it's an inanimate object.
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.
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.
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.
I make hats for lots of iconic people, and that makes my job very interesting.
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.
Certainly, people like Gaga have introduced a new type of hat-wearing.
People are dressing like stars, which is kind of fantastic.
