David Hockney

The theme of artist at home has sprung dozens of stories where a visionary creates a vividly alive environment that becomes not only their studio, but a “total artwork” (Germans have a term for it: Gesamtkunstwerk). History of art – especially the British one – has plenty of examples of such romances between creatives and their surroundings. Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. Sir John Soane’s home-turned-museum. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s Charleston, which became a bucolic residency spot for the Bloomsbury Group. For his spring-summer 2024 collection, Steven Stokey-Daley centres around the duality of ceremony and practice, following the life and home of an artist. Harry Styles’ favourite designer began his research by studying the lives of British painters Lucien Freud and David Hockney in their working environments, taking a look back at British public school dress while examining the shifts in sexual identity in the early 1900s. All that sounds distinctly S.S. Daley. The new season offering is a neat continuation of Steven’s style vocabulary: clean-cut suiting is paired with pleated shorts, blooming hydrangea embroideries decorate striped workwear sets, oversized wool knits are canvases for charming dachshund puppies (Hockney’s favorite breed, as well as mine!) and ducks. Some of the shirts come in still life fruit bowl print, which reminisces the ever-evolving European artistic tradition. Multi-pocketed, waterproof coats are nonchalantly splashed with paint (you just always splatter your favorite clothes while painting!), echoing the collection’s idea of merging the domestic intimacy with the sacred act of creating and expressing your own, untamed, highly-personal thing.

And here’s a bunch of my favourite S.S. Daley items you can shop right now:

S.S.Daley Navy ‘Bunny Boy’ Long Sleeve T-Shirt

S.S.Daley Off-White Tabard Vest

S.S.Daley Off-White Striped Shirt

S.S.Daley Red Tabard Vest

S.S.Daley Beige Large Tote

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Angela Missoni, the new woman behind the iconic brand, Missoni, showed the new boho chic in her SS15 collection. Covered with the ethnic Missoni ZIGZAG print, we saw a rhapsody of over-size tredn: trousers in aqua marine colour; skirts in blush pink; Diana Vreeland like turbans on the model’s heads; gorgeous pyjama shirts… in other words, I wanted to jump into the perfect David Hockney pool, when I saw the collection for the first time. There were sensational flaring coats in lace knit double-faced with nylon tulle—a knitwear breakthrough for Missoni, because it created a perfect paradox: substance with a gossamer lightness. The embroidered flowers only made the coats better. The simplest shapes—a smock, a shift—were elongated and energized by finely graded colors. Missoni ruled yesterday with it’s boho triumph. Art by David Hockney.