As a transvestite I am especially anxious about the prospect of going bald. I’ve never liked wigs, I find them too hot and hard to style but I’ve always comforted myself with the exciting possibilities of hats. If my meagre sprinkling of follicles were to fail me, one place I would be visiting is Elizabeth Street in the unpromising vicinity of Victoria coach station. There I will find the boutique belonging to that fabulous milliner Philip Treacy. Treacy, five-time winner of British fashion accessories designer of the year, makes millinery that would fit into all three categories for hats listed by Katharine Whitehorn: “Offensive, Defensive and Shrapnel.” I’m sure I would look good in a Treacy hat, for I was once mistaken for a relative of the Duchess of Cornwall and Treacy made the feather headpiece she wore for her wedding.

Around the corner from his shop is a small gallery in Ecclestone Street called Eleven which the Duchess’s daughter Laura runs with Charlie Phillips. They asked Treacy if he would curate a summer show. Treacy wanted to celebrate the influence that one of the great British fashion photographers, Norman Parkinson (1913-1990), has had on his work. He has selected 18 Parkinson photographs featuring hats and grouped them with drawings he has made of his millinery.

The hats in Treacy’s drawings are whimsical soufflés, feathery fascinators that dance like the lures of deep sea fishes, or surreal headpieces on which perch lobsters, castles or Warholian Brillo boxes. This spirit of playfulness, wit and elegance is very much what Parkinson brought to fashion photography, which until the Second World War had been static and posed. His humour is exemplified in the photograph from British Vogue of 1949, Wenda Eating Spaghetti, in which Parkinson’s wife – every inch the effortlessly graceful lady – has tangled her long string of pearls in a forkful of pasta.

Many of the pictures feature the icy porcelain beauties of the period. A time when the word “lady” could be used without conjuring up Emily Howard, David Walliams’s rubbish transvestite from Little Britain. These upper-crust gels seem to maintain their deportment whether wearing a turtle on their heads or sporting a demure straw tifter in the eerily car-free postwar streets. They symbolised an ideal of womanhood that would be cast off like a corset in the Sixties.

Most of the models are named and there are some familiar faces, such as Marlene Dietrich seated at the Café de Paris and Iman (Mrs D. Bowie) on her first professional shoot. Less well known but no less elegant are Nena von Schlebrugge, who turns out to be Uma Thurman’s mother, and Lisa Fonssagrives, wife of another great photographer, Irving Penn.

Treacy’s drawings strike me as a wry memorial. All the faces bear a resemblance to his great friend, sponsor and muse Isabella Blow, who died in May. “A hat,” she said, “protects you from the fashion vampires . . . I don’t want to be kissed by all and sundry.”

Fashion, hats, beauty are bound up with feelings very close to the quick of the soul. Blow, who was prone to depression, also said: “If I feel really low I go to see Philip, cover my face [with his hats] and feel fantastic . . . wearing his hats is like cosmetic surgery.”

I always admired Blow; she was a character from another age, when people went the extra mile to maintain standards. She probably wore hats for breakfast. I wish I had time for such refinements. If I were not an artist my dream job would be to take on the role left vacant by the Queen Mother, opening things in a flouncy dress and a big hat, smiling, waving, that sort of thing.

Philip Treacy and Norman Parkinson runs at Eleven Gallery, London SW1 (020-7823 5540), until Sept 8

For a slideshow of Philip Treacy's drawings, go to timesonline.co.uk/visualarts

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