Men’s – British Boy. S.S. Daley AW24

Pitti Uomo had two guest designers this year: the punk-at-heart Magliano and the very-English S.S. Daley. The latter had a big announcement to make: the minority-investment boost from Harry Styles, who’s a frequent collaborator and muse of the brand. The musician wears Steven Stokey-Daley‘s clothes at such frequency that one might easily say that the London-based brand is Harry Styles-coded. But it’s really the other way round.

Back to the autumn-winter 2024 collection: it was a story of an Englishman in Florence, playing fast and loose with the entrenched emblems and rites of passage of the British upper class boy’s school culture. The themes – some familiar S.S. Daley heartland classics, wrapped up in the kind of storytelling twists he once called micro-subversions – might have been less theatrical in their delivery than usual, but they came with a flourish of polish and confidence. On came a lad wearing a tail-coat, shirt, and no trousers – partly an echo of the wastrel party-going culture of Oxford in the 1980s that was captured by the photographer Dafydd Jones. But partly, too, it was the introduction of his queer evocation of a diary by an Oxford student in 1935. “He always opened each entry with writing about being ‘in Eliot’s room.’” Stokey-Daley had stacks of pillows installed as a conceptual set. “So the idea is that this suddenly becomes this abstracted version of Eliot’s room – and it’s more a conversation about that sort of shared living. Underwear, pajamas, sporting wear, boys in tails.” A huge, quilted piped-edged duvet coat and a couple vast ‘tapestry’ knitted blanket ponchos riffed on the morning-after idea of rolling out of bed wrapped in your bedclothes. Alongside this, the designer had been reading “The Last Panic,” a short story by E. M. Forster about a young English boy’s “carnal awakening” with a fisherman while on holiday in Italy. Hence the symbolic oversize fish-print that turned up on a shirt later in the collection. But, really, ‘reading’ S.S. Daley doesn’t require crib notes and reference studies. The point of his clothes, ever since he was a student himself, is that they’re never costume. They are very British, of course, but just always a little cleverly, quirkily left of the generically classic.