URCHIN ©️
URCHIN© 2016
Original images below
A headpiece about the people who get inside your head before you know it
Years ago I was in Dahab, on the Red Sea — that stretch of coast on the Sinai Peninsula, before you head further up towards Jordan and Israel, where the Bedouin communities live. I went out snorkelling, nothing serious, just a mask and a little snorkel sticking out of the water. It started beautifully — clear sandy sea bed, all these different coloured fish drifting past. I'm not a strong swimmer, so I never went out far or deep. And then, without warning, the sea urchins were everywhere. I don't think I've ever got back to shore so fast in my life.
That image stayed with me for years, and it came back recently for an entirely different reason.
I've spent time around people who are master manipulators — calculated, strategic, cold in a very particular way. The kind of people who don't argue with you, don't confront you, just quietly plant something in your mind and let it grow on its own. A comment here. An implied criticism there. A suggestion dressed up as a compliment. You don't always notice it happening, because that's the point — it works underneath your conscious awareness, not against it.
Being around people like that used to give me actual headaches. Not a figure of speech — a real, booming, piercing pressure. And the image that always came to mind was exactly that moment in Dahab: as though they were physically planting sea urchins into my head, spine by spine, the same way they seemed to appear out of nowhere in that water.
The uncomfortable truth is that some people are genuinely skilled at this. Intelligent, patient, precise. You can't be fully protected from it just by being aware it exists — awareness helps, but it isn't armour on its own. What actually helps is the slower work: knowing yourself well enough that someone else's planted thought doesn't take root so easily. The more integrated you are, the less space there is for someone else's agenda to quietly move in and live there instead.
That's the dark part of this piece. But it isn't meant to stay dark — it's meant to be looked at, worn, turned into something arresting rather than something that just sits as a warning.
The Making Of
The piece was built entirely by hand, held up against my own head mid-construction to judge the scale and spread before it was finished — you can see that stage of the process in some of the earlier shots. The whole thing was finished in black, giving it that dense, radiating silhouette. I'll leave some of the construction details private rather than laying out the exact method — partly because a little mystery suits the piece, and partly because how it's built is its own small piece of craft.
Once complete, it was reinterpreted digitally, styled onto a model, giving the same silhouette a second life in a different context — from something made in a front room to something that reads as full editorial. Looking at the final images now, there's something distinctly Philip Treacy about it — that same instinct for taking a single striking shape and letting it dominate completely.
The final effect is the sea urchin taken to its logical extreme: a burst of black spines radiating from the crown, striking and slightly dangerous to look at, worn with total stillness against a plain, immaculate outfit. The contrast is the point. Calm on the outside. All that spiked intensity sitting right at the centre of the mind.
