After winning the i-D Styling and Maria Luisa awards at 2007’s International Talent Support (a.k.a. ITS) – an annual event in Trieste supporting young fashion designers and photographers – a shell-shocked Justin Smith threw himself into celebrations. Smith, born in 1978, is the millinery world’s new rising star. His MA show at London’s Royal College of Art was extremely well received. ‘The concept for my show was based all around the performative hat’, he says. ‘I started with the models, found out what they performed with and worked back from there. For example, the burlesque fan dancer wore the fans on her head as part of the hat, and took them off and performed on the catwalk with them. So the main themes were the performative hat inspired by circus, performance and an East End Victorian funeral’. His graduate collection is bound to take your breath away. So how did this ambitious and hardworking milliner go from training as a chef to hairdressing to millinery? ‘It has been an organic process on following my creativity’, he explains. ‘The story is too long for a better explanation!’ While Justin labours in his studio on private commissions and collaborates with designers for fashion week, he continues to be a hairdresser three days a week. But with such obvioustalent, he’ll be far too busy making hats to hold down the part-time job for long.

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‘I overdosed on art, psycho-analytic theory and philosophy, and that clogged up my creativity’, says London-based Gordon Cheung of his artistic state in 2001 after graduating from the Royal College of Art. A six-week residency in Pakistan in 2003 changed all that. ‘The combination of being away, seeing some amazingly kitsch decorated trucks, and meeting some very interesting artists, had a huge impact on me’, he says. Cheung’s art hints at an apocalyptic future, informed by science-fiction writers like JG Ballard, Philip K Dick, David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick. Using spray paint, oil, acrylic, pastels, stock listings and ink, Cheung’s futuristic landscapes are dramatic collisions of the virtual world and reality. Cheung has the third eye, the ability to see what lies ahead. Though, unfortunately, not just now. ‘My soothsayer hat is at the dry cleaners’, he says. ‘So I am bereft of the abilities to foretell the future!’

Elizabeth McGrath’s art is like something out of An American Werewolf in London or a Tim Burton production. Part-gothic, part-whimsical, Elizabeth draws inspiration from roadside attractions, decaying cities, nature, fashion, architecture, interior design, churches of all kinds, movies, good magazines, folklore, music, literature and poetry. Since her first paid job at the age of eight – tying black ribbons round flower vases for her aunt’s Irish style pub restaurant – Elizabeth joined a band, started a fanzine, and then accidentally fell into making art. ‘Our band was asked to play an art show and party for the magazine Juxtapoz’, she says. ‘When the promoter came to drop off posters, he saw a painting I was working on and invited me to hang it in the show. The piece sold to a gallerist who then included me in several of his group shows and I was later asked to do a solo show at the La Luz de Jesus gallery’. She is currently keeping busy working on a number of projects including an upcoming show (The Incurable Disorder) scheduled to launch this December at the Billy Shire fine arts gallery; a recording with her band Miss Derringer; book projects; toy projects; and a clothing line. With so many things going on, just where does she get her ideas from? ‘I build a cocoon of images in a corner of my studio, and when I can’t think of what to do next I crawl in and it gives me super powers!’