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Not long ago, a hat was a conformist accessory. Then the 1960s came along, and young people didn't want to wear hats.

By the 1980s, practically no one under 60 in the real civilian world wore hats for anything except weddings, funerals or Ascot. Hats had been in competition with hair, and hair had won. Thirty years before that, Brits of all classes and ages wore hats all the time.

Working women wore hats. It was the only way they would take you seriously.

When I see old movies with women in floor-length dressing gowns, or when they're going to the store and they've got a pillbox hat with a net over the eyes and white gloves, I'm offended that I can't go to the store like that.

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.

The classic hat image was during the Forties and Fifties, and Elizabeth Taylor was the epitome of that; she was the ultimate celebrity of excess and glamour, and she worked major sun hats.

A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.

It's the kind of clothes that mothers and daughters can wear, in terms of concept... It's not about age. It's about taste, and it's about lifestyle. I believe women of all ages can wear anything.

It's fun conjuring what people will be wearing in the future. We exist in this world today, and yet there are people walking around who still look like they're in the '60s.

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.