S.S. Daley

Enter Steven Stokey-Daley, with an explosive London Fashion Week debut that took the form of a play, performed and written by a cast of the National Youth Theatre. The lookbook of his S.S Daley English public school-inspired collection—which you see here—was shot, on the actors, aged 18 to 24, in an interval in rehearsals. One hour later, they took to the ‘stage’—actually, the New Gen show space—to rivet an unsuspecting fashion audience with a visceral three-act drama co-written around the tensions of class, masculinity, race, sexuality, same-sex love, and institutionalized violence in British public schools for boys.

The backstory: Stokey-Daley became a member of the National Youth Theatre from his state school in Liverpool at the age of 16, before he went to study menswear at Westminster University (he graduated in 2020). “It feels like it’s the right time for creative industries to lean on each other, to provide opportunities for each other, and to support one another and to merge together,” he said. Paul Roseby, director of the NYT, which has a remit to find acting talent from all backgrounds, agreed. During the pandemic, when theaters have been dark, and fashion presentation formats have been up for question, all sorts of new cross-pollinating links are happening between disciplines that were previously too stuck up, or stuck in their own busy lanes to cooperate.

The young don’t see any of it in that way. Which is why, after answering a casting call, the actors were up for taking part in devising a play around Stokey-Daley’s themes that would run for precisely one night, in front of a fashion, not a theater audience. “They opened up about their different experiences at school,” the designer said in a rehearsal break. “It’s an incredible, diverse cast of boys from both private and state schools, who’ve had real-life and multi-layered experiences. It’s been beautiful to see.”

Roseby directed the conversations, the sharing of memories which shaped the tender and traumatic incidents and testimonies: scenes evoking classroom, locker room, dorm, and rugby pitch, working up to a disturbing finale of a drunken Eton College-style traditional graduation, all flower-laden boaters and aggression. “It had to be true to them and to the collection, ”the director said. “What we’re doing here is bringing out the human story, the shared lived experience of these 10 incredible people who all identify as male.”

Stokey-Daley’s story as a designer came about as an ephiphany in the Westminster University studio, which happens to overlook the playing fields of Harrow School, one of the establishments, like Eton, which traditionally trains the ruling elite (from whence came Boris Johnson, David Cameron, and a large number of the present Conservative government). Daley, a proud member of the working class, developed a fascination with researching that alien culture—researching his own angle as a gay young man on its history, psycho-sociology, and the specifics of its clothing, through Westminster’s menswear clothing archive, and immersing himself in films like Brideshead Revisited, Another Country, and Maurice.

When lockdown came, he started his S.S Daley collection, selling direct to consumers through his Instagram and website, with the brilliant tagline “Championing quality & frivolity while maintaining ecological integrity.” He makes from vintage fabrics and deadstock materials. A luxurious windowpane checked coat in the play was made from Alexander McQueen surplus fabric donated by Sarah Burton. A rugby shirt is cut from a sumptuous piece of antique crewel-work embroidery. An adapted paisley-pattern bomber jacket with bows on the pockets was once upholstery fabric intended for a cruise ship.

Even while working on his own at home in Liverpool, in the darkest days, Stokey-Daley hit on items—his extreme wide-leg Oxford bags and beautifully-sewn shirts—which had instant resonance and sales. It turned out that young men all over the world were up for the fashion and were watching to snap up his one-of-a-kind pieces. When the stylist Harry Lambert discovered him and called in some clothes for Harry Styles, Stokey-Daley didn’t think anything would necessarily come of it. It certainly did. In October last year, Harry Styles wore all of them—wide trousers he’d made from floral linen curtains, a white pintucked voile shirt—in the video of his song “Golden.”

That was just the beginning, but a solid and grounded beginning based on real sales and a complete delight in what he does. It’s a bit of a wonder that he’s come to London and launched his brand in physical form in fashion week in a way nobody’s ever quite done before. The collective sense of youthful optimism, energy, and talent from that stage couldn’t have been more real.