S.S. Daley

All eyes on were on Steven Stokey-Daley today as he took his first step into womenswear—it was a light and confident one, illuminated by an aura of young London buzz from either side of the runway. On one side, there was Harry Styles—his minority investor and very early adopter—and on the other, Emma Corrin, who made their way in dressed in two pieces from the collection that was about to be shown. Their beaded abstract floral tank and black tailored Bermudas turned out to be a coda of kinds for Stokey-Daley’s inspiration—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.

Quick note here to say it didn’t read as the least bit historically labored. It was a flowy, contemporary combination of Stokey-Daley’s English handcrafty talent, his tailoring, and wafty things—including the clever addition of a silk floral side-ripple to his signature Oxford bags.

But to backtrack a bit. Four years have been a lot in the life of Steven Stokey-Daley. “Phew, this has been a whirlwind since beginning,” he exclaimed before the show, and he was not exaggerating. His story is not much short of pandemic fashion miracle: In 2020, the designer was but a recent Westminster University graduate, Instagramming his final collection—all Oxford bags and romantic shirts upcycled from deadstock materials and charity shop finds—while locked down in his home in Liverpool.

Double-Harry magic happened for Stokey-Daley when Harry Lambert, Harry Styles’s stylist, contacted him, among all sorts of fashion-fanatical young men who were suddenly jumping into his DMs to order from their lockdown-situation bedrooms in America, Korea, and Europe. Famously, Styles sent Stokey-Daley’s looks—and the designer’s name—viral when he wore them in his “Golden” video in 2020.

Post-pandemic, Stokey-Daley instantly lifted London’s spirits with his very British-subversive theater play on queering upper-class boys’ school uniform. His take on all of that is classic, funny, and refreshingly youthful all at the same time. Such delights as his adorable dachshund sweaters have only added to the daft English sense of fun around his brand—irresistible buys, gifts, whatever.

Even funnier: These days you’re as likely to see actual English gents—say at the Chelsea Flower Show, or at a country house weekend—wearing S.S. Daley as a Harry Styles fan. This, of course, indicates that the label possesses a highly unusual, growing social bandwidth—something different from your normal young designer mini-niche.

However garlanded he’s been with awards, Stokey-Daley, by nature a grounded working class Northerner, has let none of it go to his head: not even winning the LVMH Prize in 2022, and adding the Queen Elizabeth II Award for Design to his trophy shelf yesterday. “People are asking me, ‘why are you doing womenswear right now?’” he stated, taking the bull by the horns. “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.”

Meaning: He was finding a rationale, a bridge connecting his menswear aesthetics, and the politics behind it, with womenswear. Gluck was born Hannah Gluckstein into the wealthy Lyons Corner Tea Room family, cropped her hair at 21, wore men’s clothes, cut her second name in half and ran away to Cornwall to live amongst a group of likeminded friends. Stokey-Daley’s principle of queering English classics sailed through into the ‘feminine’ in the form of knife-pleated flower print skirts and pixellated blue roses on beaded handbags, and the ‘masculine’ a ‘morning suit’ and a white tuxedo with pin-tucked panels (a light reprise of the detail of Harry Styles’s “Golden” shirt-front).

Floral things sat underneath big-collared, practical trench coats. “You just sort of see the skirt, like sweeping the floor. It feels really effective in motion,” said Stokey-Daley. There had to be dogs, too, naturally: a Chelsea lady silk headscarf-type print of black and white pointers made into a blouse and a knee-length skirt, and then emblazoned on a sweater. “We have to have moments of humor!” said the designer, adding: “Constance Spry was a very husband-and-wife middle England lady. Which I kind of love! Gluck had sort of commissioned floral arrangements for their house. I think it went from there. I think the gorgeous thing is that juxtaposition, the super-contrasting nature of Gluck with Constance’s flowers, which Gluck painted in a super-stylized way. And so,” he added, keeping a straight face, “this collection is Gluck on top, and Constance underneath.”

Stokey-Daley has also been scrupulously conscious of getting the direction of his womenswear right before he plunged into it. “Our team is me, Leo, Sam, Kirsten, and Clem—and Kirsten and Clem are both actually queer women, who had a big input here.” He canvassed his female makeup and hair team too. “It’s really important for me, in fittings and everything, that we have women around what it looks like. To be candid, my biggest fear coming into this is that I didn’t want to be either of two fashion cliché tropes—to be a gay male putting women in nothing, or binding women down the wrong way, which we’re seeing even today. And I also didn’t want to ignore the female form. I want to listen to my friends: what do they want to wear?”

There’s a can-do, have-a-go Englishness about S.S. Daley—there’s something doom-busting about it, a sense of humor that always comes to the rescue in London, even in the darkest times. As he stood amongst the gloriously English installation of flower arrangements at the end of his show—surrounded by Constance Fry’s original vases—he put it like this: “In these kind of moments, I think it’s a case of that saying, ‘From concrete, roses can rise from the cracks.’”