Steven Stokey-Daley served us the great, British classics, revisited and refreshed, with good humour. Cropped trenches (Burberry could take notes). Cool pea-coats. Tailored bermudas. Full-skirts in floral prints worn with work-jackets (the look gave Frazzled English Woman energy!). And then there was Marianne Faithfull. A rendition of frilly blouse she was famously photographed wearing in the late 1960s was on the runway. A lovely chunky knit “Stay Faithfull To Marianne” was there, too. The designer was quick to make it clear he hadn’t jumped on the bandwagon of her recent passing. “Maggie Smith, Kate Bush, and Marianne Faithfull have been the three women who’ve always meant so much to me,” he said. S.S. Daley reminds us than we need London Fashion Week, even if it’s in (hopefully temporary) shambles.
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S.S. Daley kicked off the unexpectedly good and brisky London Fashion Week (pardon my review delay – been busy for a couple of days!). This is Steven Stokey-Daley‘s first full womenswear collection, and it’s clear from the very first look that the designer knows what he wants to bring to this very overfilled table with his offering. The collection was inspired with the life of the British painter Gluck, who presented as a man in the 1920s and ’30s, and Constance Spry, the hugely fashionable high society florist, who was one of her many lovers. What makes this collection standout is that it didn’t read historically labored or archaic, but gracefully conveyed the idea of dandy-ish flamboyance, a very British thing, and quite rare to see in women’s collections. Spring-summer 2025 was a contemporary combination of Stokey-Daley’s English handcrafty talent, his spirited tailoring, and quirk for off-kilter details (think the silk floral side-ripple to his signature Oxford bags). “People are asking me, ‘why are you doing womenswear right now?’” the designer stated. “It’s like, the economy’s crashed, everyone’s struggling. But I think there’s one simple answer. I began this brand in a pandemic, and it does feel like quite a bleak time in the universe right now. But I’ve had an idea simmering for a while. And London’s a resilient place.”
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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.
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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:
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Sir Ian McKellen emerged from the shadows to begin the S.S. Daley autumn-winter 2023 show in a silk sailor’s cap and a navy peacoat decorated with a nude male form. Reciting one of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Arthurian poems, his rich Shakespearean lilt spoke of mighty waves and roaring voices, delivered with the kind of presence that comes from a lifetime treading the boards. So far, so Steven Stokey-Daley: the designer has woven the energy of live performance into all three of his previous shows. But it turns out that Stokey-Daley was initially planning to do away with the theatrics completely this season, until McKellen unexpectedly reached out to the designer and the idea of him opening the show sprung up. “You don’t say no to Sir Ian McKellen,” said Stokey-Daley at a preview before the show. “To be honest, I couldn’t really believe it.” Given Stokey-Daley’s meteoric rise over the past two-and-a-half years, he shouldn’t be so surprised. The S.S. Daley whirlwind began in 2020 when he sent a portfolio of his graduate collection to stylist Harry Lambert, who then dressed his client Harry Styles in a full look for his “Golden” music video. From there, attention exploded, culminating in Stokey-Daley taking home the LVMH Prize and the emerging designer gong at the British Fashion Awards last year in quick succession. It was only after his show this past September, Stokey-Daley explains, that he was able to pause and fully take stock of his rapid ascent – and he found himself feeling strangely deflated. “Everything was great on paper, but I felt like, post-LVMH Prize, I had a lot to prove,” Stokey-Daley said. He felt he should reintroduce the brand with a bang last season and scaled up his runway experience, with an ambitious set inspired by Sissinghurst Castle Gardens. His initial urge to do without the theatrical bells and whistles this time was partly in response to that, channeling this emotional turbulence into artfully disheveled, navy-inspired clothes that trailed with loose strings of thread and lengths of knitted bunting, as if the models been dragged from a shipwreck. “This collection is more of a reflection of my state of mind than anything I’ve done before,” he said.
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