Piers Atkinson has worn nearly as many hats as he’s made. Artist, illustrator, milliner, costume designer, party organiser, fashion editor, project manager – his creative energies only seem to be matched by an insatiable curiosity.

He grew up in Norfolk with three generations of women – his mother, herself a milliner; his sister Lucy, the long-suffering photographic model for his teenage reconstructions of Grace Jones and Art of Noise record covers; and his grandmother, the artist/writer/horticulturalist and illustrator Lesley Gordon, from whom he took his multi-disciplinary cue.

Piers has had many great influences down the line, from his mother the theatrical milliner Hilary Elliott, at whose knee he learned hat-making, to Stephen Jones, who paid a brief but memorable visit to his grad show at University of Bristol, where he studied graphic design and photography.

Moving to London in 1995, he helped out at that year’s Alternative Miss World, the brainchild of artist Andrew Logan, now an occasional collaborator but constant inspiration to Piers: ‘He helped me see the rich possibilities of free-form events and a ‘just do it’ attitude.’ Much of which, it should be pointed out, could be seen in the successful Show-Off nightclub events that Piers co-created from 1999 to 2001. He also showed a range of his idiosyncratic and charmingly anachronistic character sketches in a joint exhibition, which included Logan, in 2002, and the Maria Chen curated Oki-Ni exhibition in 2004.

In 1999, Piers started with iconic fashion designer Zandra Rhodes, who he assisted with art direction and in-house PR. ‘She instantly cured my conservative approach to colour!’ says Piers. When Rhodes became a client of PR powerhouse Mandi Lennard, Piers took a post there assisting Mandi, who gave him many of her unique insights into the fashion world. After a similar stint at Blow PR, he joined Disorder Magazine as fashion editor for a shelf-full of issues. It was in this capacity that he proposed a newspaper for Graduate Fashion Week, featuring a star column by the Daily Telegraph’s fashion director, Hilary Alexander. This later led to Piers proposing and creating the daily for London Fashion Week (scouting Jenny Dyson of Teen Vogue as co-editor), an intense and rewarding experience. One of the rewards was the small range of hats he created during this time to ‘let off steam’ – a range that became his debut collection. He has since collaborated with designers Ashish and Noki for runway presentations, has pieces in the V&A’s ‘Hats: an Anthology by Stephen Jones’, has dressed celebrities Cate Blanchett in Vogue and Lily Allen in Spin Magazine and is currently in talks with designers across the pond…