The class act of S.S. Daley

Steven Stokey-Daley works in a small studio in East London, like so many young and emerging fashion designers. It’s nondescript: blank white walls, pattern-cutting tables filling the space, bitterly cold in January. If you expect something elegiac and romantic like the flower-strewn fashion presentations or lookbook imagery of his label, S.S. Daley – which mostly resemble backstage outtakes of Cecil Beaton shooting a Brideshead adaptation – you’ll be sorely disappointed. There are no marbles or busts, no artfully draped curtains. No flowers. This space is expressive not of fantasy but of the pragmatic reality of a designer trying to make it in a doubly tough time in an already tough-enough industry. Fashion isn’t for the faint of heart, especially not at what we hope is the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Stokey-Daley counts himself lucky he has the space at all. Previously, he was holed up at his childhood home in the suburbs of Liverpool in the North West of England, furiously sourcing fabrics and haranguing retailers and press to interest them in his wares.

That said, there are a few glimmers of another time and another place in his London space: the clothes in process all around, for instance, which seem gloriously incongruous to their humdrum surroundings. There’s a pair of thickly purled cable-knit vests from his Spring/Summer 2022 collection laid on a table, seeming raiments of a 1930s cricket beer match, yet actually brand new. There’s a two-piece outfit in hallucinogenic purple and lilac zebra stripes destined, Stokey-Daley tells me, for the musician Mick Fleetwood. And there are a few posters of another musician, Harry Styles, a pin-up for millions, wearing the label’s clothes.

Let’s get this out of the way at the start: Stokey-Daley’s studio is next door to that of Styles’ stylist Harry Lambert. After his 2020 graduation from the University of Westminster fashion design BA, via email from his bedroom in Liverpool, he showed Lambert some shirts and trousers he’d created. Lambert was interested, and commissioned pieces for Styles, with no guarantee he would wear any of them, which is the way dressing popstars normally works. But Styles did wear them, a lot, notably in his video for Golden and accompanying single artwork. If you Google that abstract adjective now, even with no context, the first result that pops up is Styles’ video. You can, of course, buy advertising like that – many brands do. But Stokey-Daley didn’t, and when interest in him exploded, he was nonplussed. Luckily, when the spotlight shone, he – and, more importantly, his clothes – were ready.

Stokey-Daley’s second post-graduate collection – the first S.S. Daley show – was that moment. Staged to a packed audience at London Fashion Week last September, his garments were worn not by models, but a retinue of ten actors from the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain – Will Atiomo, Tomás Azocar-Nevin, Alexander Da Fonseca, Billy Hinchliff, Jez Davess-Humphrey, William Gao, Felix Kai, Gael Mfula, Nay Murphy and Liam Whiting. All male-identifying, aged from 18 to 25, their backgrounds nevertheless ran the gamut – Atiomo, for example, is an old Etonian, only the second Black student. Notice the use of ‘show’ and ‘stage’: this was no ordinary catwalk experience, rather a short theatrical production specially created by NYT artistic director Paul Roseby, exploring school experiences alongside entwined themes of sexuality, masculinity and race. For Stokey-Daley, it was giving back to theatre that he stated had given him so much. “After a two-year period where actors have had their literal world ripped away from them – theatres closed, the government saying it isn’t important enough to fund – their entire being has stopped, in a way that fashion hasn’t,” Stokey-Daley says. “And we’ve got everything there. We’ve got lights, we’ve got a space – why would we waste that? Why don’t we just come together? This is a great way to push theatre in front of people – and also to give this group of boys an IRL experience. They were so excited about it.”

The energy of the result was a testament to that enthusiasm. Think Lord of the Flies for the 21st Century, only without the bloodshed. The clothes referenced the attire of privilege, with a backwards bent to the golden interwar and postcard periods, before stately homes either crumbled or opened their grandest rooms to public rambles, before social mores were completely upended. Wide-legged Famous Five shorts, rugby shirts, jacquard dressing gowns, the archaic tailcoats often sported as part of public-schoolboy uniforms – all were present and correct, in the unexpected dusty pastels that seem to be the S.S. Daley house colours. The result was about neither performance nor clothes, but both, harmonised, each adding depth and meaning to the other.

Given that, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when meeting Stokey-Daley. He went to the National Youth Theatre himself for a summer in his teens and harboured serious ambition to become an actor, but he isn’t overly dramatic in the flesh. Like his studio, he comes across as practical and no-nonsense, dressed not in his blousy volumes nor lavish embroideries but in a neat zipped black top, perched on a stool, probably eager to get back to work a few weeks before his Autumn/Winter 2022 London Fashion Week show. Stokey-Daley is happy to talk, with a typically northern loquaciousness. He’s 25, a flash of braces on his teeth making him seem younger, and his words are couched in the flattened vowels, dropped ‘g’s and catarrh-y ‘k’s of the Scouse accent. I’m used to it – my parents live close to where Stokey-Daley grew up. I was in nearby Lancashire, in Bolton, where the town clock didn’t have hands for an extended period of time. It seemed to sum up the place: timeless, somewhat inescapable. My own father has a pithy saying: born in the north, live in the north, die in the north. Light-hearted. Stokey-Daley’s background is one many northern kids share. It’s one of escape, to something brighter, better. “Massively,” Stokey-Daley says. “I think that actually was the first crack in my tight friendship group in school. I actually remember the conversation. I asked, ‘So where are you going to go? Well, I’m going to go to London.’ And they were like, ‘...go to London?’” He laughs, lightly. Many of his friends are still in Liverpool now, working normal jobs, having babies.

By contrast, Stokey-Daley had the impetus to move from an unexpected source: his grandmother, Denise. “She worked in a local sewing factory as a teenager, with her two sisters. It’s kind of a thing around where I live – she worked there as soon as she turned 14, and she absolutely loved it. Her sisters hated it. But she really wanted to stay. She was offered an opportunity to move to London, to be an apprentice for a tailor. And she was going to take it, but her family sat her down and said, ‘You need to meet someone, to settle down here.’ I think she felt pressured to do that. And she says that she’s always, always wondered what life would have been. She doesn’t regret it, she’s still with my grandad, but she’s always said, ‘I just wish that I was born in a different time. Because opportunity is just so different.’ She was never encouraged – she was actively encouraged to do the opposite.” He pauses. “I found that so heartbreaking – actually, really, really sad. I think she lives vicariously through me, to go and just do that. She’s always pushed me. I think she’s the main reason why I have so much drive.”

You’d be forgiven for not immediately detecting Stokey-Daley’s working-class background in his clothes. But that summer at the National Youth Theatre when he was 14 made an impression: it’s woven into what he makes. His clothes have a lush, histrionic bent: billowing blousey shirts; capacious Shakespearean coats; brocade trousers of near Scarlett O’Hara proportions actually made from torn-down curtains (not from Tara, granted). The Robe Room is Becoming the Garden was the title of his post-graduation collection – a twist on the title of a haunting, plaintive Michael Nyman song from his baroque score to the 1982 Peter Greenaway period film The Draughtsman’s Contract. Watch a few flickering clips of that on YouTube and the brocades, bobbing hats and exaggerated hairstyles aren’t a million miles from territory Stokey-Daley has, even at this nascent point in his career, established as his own.

Before these clothes risk falling off a tightrope into the ridiculous, there is a practicality – perhaps born of Stokey-Daley’s background. Grounding touches of sportswear, easy stuff: knits, brief jackets cuffed deep with ribbing, boxer shorts worn as normal shorts, and the kind of clingy, revealing wrestling singlets around which a whole homoerotic online subculture has been built. Uniforms of hyper-masculinity are what interests Stokey-Daley – of other upbringings and his own, often combining the two. It stems, he says, from a specific point in time. As a fashion student at Westminster, he was walking near that school’s campus in Middlesex, close to Harrow, the English public school whose most famous alumnus – known as Old Harrovians – is probably Winston Churchill. Or maybe Lord Byron. Harrow was perched on a hill. “It’s a different world to us below,” Stokey-Daley says. Walking up the hill, Stokey-Daley was suddenly surrounded by students of that school, be-blazered – blazers are known as ‘bluers’, worn with dove-grey wide-legged trousers (‘greyers’) – Harrow boaters clutched under one arm, walking in pairs. Their otherwise arcane costume, en masse, made Stokey-Daley feel like an outsider. “I remember I felt ridiculous when I walked there,” he laughs. It also illustrated, up front, the students’ connections to one another. “That’s what all those vintage Merchant Ivory films are all about – a bond between boys,” Stokey-Daley says. “It’s a ridiculously hyper-masculine culture,” one he reasons isn’t homosexual but homosocial, “a friendly thing that blurs the lines but isn’t overtly sexual. I found it fascinating.”

Stokey-Daley collides those literal uniforms of upper-class public schools with the unofficial uniforms of the working class – beaten-up trackies (hard Scouse accent on ‘t’ and ‘k’) laid against the flower-bedecked boaters – worn by Etonians on the Fourth of June Day in honour of George III’s birthday. “In the context of Eton and Harrow, that look is its own version of hyper-masculine,” Stokey-Daley says. Applied to rose-bedecked straw hats, it says a lot. “And then, looking back to where I grew up, sportswear, The North Face, that’s also hyper-masculine. It’s in two different ways. And if we switched two people, from each world, they would be seen as the polar opposite.” He stops. “It’s massively about class.”

The Book of Judges tells of the tribe of the Ephraimites whose pronunciation of the word shibbōleth – the Hebrew word for ‘stream’ – betrayed their origins, leading them to be instantly killed. I don’t know it from there, but it reminds me of Nancy Mitford’s satirical expounding of U and non-U speech in the 1950s – ‘U’ denoting the upper class, ‘non-U’ the aspiring upper-middle classes – and the inward shudder she declared to repress when, say, someone used the word ‘serviette’ instead of ‘napkin’. Between classes, she said, “there is a very definite borderline, easily recognisable by hundreds of small but significant landmarks.” The working class didn’t get a look-in.

Class, I’ve been told, is something difficult to the point of near-impossibility to articulate to anyone not inured from birth to its idiosyncrasies and vagaries. Which is, basically, anyone not British. That’s because class isn’t founded in physicality, the concrete, but in the ethereal and, really, unchangeable. It’s most definitely not about money – although that winds up playing a big part. In short, it’s not about what you have but about who you are, where you come from, and what you know. Hence the importance of shibbōleths, of the innate and unsaid understanding that, say, the coat you wear while you’re hunting is actually called a pink... even though it’s red.

Stokey-Daley’s work is embedded in these kinds of ideas, obsessed with them. Needless to say, he may be British but he isn’t from the aristocracy. Not many really good fashion designers are. It’s beyond premature to place him in the canon of greats like Lee Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood or John Galliano, but they all share working-class upbringings. McQueen’s father was a taxi driver, Galliano’s a plumber, Westwood’s a shopkeeper (she began as a primary school teacher before shifting her attention to fashion). Stokey-Daley grew up on a former council estate; his grandfather and father were both builders. He didn’t, however, grow up wanting to ‘better’ himself – distinct from, say, Cecil Beaton, on whose imagery and wardrobe his sophomore collection was based. Beaton was a snob, driven by the conviction that he had been born into the wrong – middle – class, and desperate to elevate himself. Stokey-Daley knew he wanted to do something else, somewhere else, but rather than aspiring to shift through classes, he is content to observe, be inspired by these other worlds rather than wishing to become part of them.

“I had interactions with people from different classes through theatre, when I was growing up. In the National Theatre, it was very supportive – a group. Kind of anti-hierarchical, because you’re all coming together. But then when I went to Uni, I was confronted. I was like, Whoa, I don’t know how to act. There were a few people in my year that were so the opposite kilter to me, I felt very uncomfortable when they spoke to me. I felt myself agreeing, toeing the line with them. People who could just throw money at the problem, while I was furiously typing emails for fabric sponsors.” He interned at Tom Ford for six months, Alexander McQueen for another six. The latter donated part of the fabric to help create his graduation collection. Others came from all different places – deadstock, leftovers, secondhand tablecloths, upholstery fabrics, the aforementioned old curtains.

There’s a true ingenuity to Stokey-Daley’s work, born of resourcefulness. It ties with sustainability, a quality many designers are seeking but which seems to come naturally to him. It also links back to his upbringing again – he grew up “surrounded by brick and mortar,” he says, and there’s a certain interest in making, construction, the inner workings as opposed to just the final outcome. He was the first member of his family to attend University. “I told one girl my family were all lawyers,” Stokey-Daley laughs, of his first years in further education. But the initial focus wasn’t fashion. Following his interest in theatre, he wanted to pursue playwriting. “I grew up the clichéd, very dramatic, over-the-top gay child. I was very into theatre and drama when I was growing up. That was the thing I was going to do,” he says. “But I think it was that expectancy of me that made me restless. I hate doing the thing that I’m expected to do. I was going to Warwick to study English literature. And I had the car packed to go and...” he exhales, “I decided not to go. I’m not afraid of hard work, but it didn’t feel right.”

He lost money on residential fees, but begged a local college to let him study art foundation instead, off the back of previous graphics studies. A tutor suggested Stokey-Daley look into fashion. He was reticent – he’d never studied textiles and couldn’t sew. One of his first projects was based not on Balenciaga or Dior, but on the work of French dramatist Antonin Artaud and his theatre of cruelty. Artaud’s interactive theatres, with the audience as key participants, feels related to Stokey-Daley’s disruption of the fashion show format. “I just carried on pushing, tying those together. I built a bridge to get to fashion.” It was, however, not costume – and remains so. “I was always adamantly not that,” he says. “I wanted to infuse these theatrical elements into everyday life.” And, of course, the uniforms associated with much of everyday life can be seen as archaic, even theatrical costume – not least public schools. “I wrote my dissertation on Brechtian theory and theatre, how it could be applied to, like, the uniform of Eton – it serves a purpose to alienate a certain part of the class structure,” Stokey-Daley reasons, casually.

I keep coming back to class, stumbling over it slightly. Stokey-Daley talks about class structures in a way we, as Brits, have always been discouraged from doing: objectively, with remove. But there is no way to extricate it from his work, unless he chooses to do so himself. His next S.S. Daley collection for Autumn/Winter 2022, Pantry, is an evolution of the obsession. He’d watched Gosford Park (“not Downton”) and become obsessed with a different reflection of class. “This season, I got really into reading about the destination of the stately home in the UK. Upstairs-downstairs, inside-outside thing. I’m able to examine the class structures similarly,” Stokey-Daley says. “We’re not looking at the public school culture I feel we wrapped up in a really nice bow. We’ve explored that over three collections – a start, middle and end – we’ve seen that boy’s progress, we’ve seen him almost graduate.”

The Spring/Summer 2022 S.S. Daley collection marked his idealised boy’s graduation. At the same time, it felt like Stokey-Daley had pushed himself to reach a new level, too. The clothes were still sensitive and soulful, but with increasing sophistication and maturity. The Harry Styles-ish shirts were still there, oversized with spread collars and voluminous Byronesque poet’s sleeves. But they were teamed with twisted pinstripe tailoring, skewed checks, granddaddy knitted tank tops, trench coats billowing in back and trailing lappets of ribbon like a long-forgotten portrait of a 17th-century dandy. Paisleys that seemed lifted from the faded cushion covers of a grand manse were cut into sweet boxer shorts but also narrow-shouldered double-breasted tailoring with soupy Oxford bags underneath. You can see why rock stars come calling for these clothes. The first look included a jacket shrunken like a school blazer, the model’s wrists hanging free of the sleeve hems as if he’d outgrown it; the last outfit was a ragged black silk morning coat – formality, sobriety and seriousness. The S.S. Daley boy grew up in the course of a single collection – from public school to House of Lords, maybe?

Even in 2022, Stokey-Daley has experienced some resistance to his ideas and approaches. “Someone once said: ‘Don’t you think you’re just fetishising Tory culture? You’re not from that world? So what right do you have to do that?’” His face seems genuinely perplexed. “Where I grew up, no one wore anything other than North Face two-pieces. Do you expect me to do that? I’m not doing that. I remember I went to see different exhibitions in London about the North, and they paint it with a very singular vision. I almost feel people are trying to keep me in that box: get back to where you belong.” The fetishisation of the working class has long been part of culture – the French even have a term for it: nostalgie de la boue. You see it in gay culture, especially: from the 19th and early 20th-century obsession with working-class ‘trade’, evident in the trial of Oscar Wilde and the writing of Christopher Isherwood, through to a more recent hyper-sexualisation of ‘chav’ or ‘scally’ dress. But flipping the tables still seems subversive, even perverse.

It’s important to state, I feel, that Stokey-Daley doesn’t see himself as a victim, or disadvantaged. This isn’t some kind of aversion to the upper classes – indeed, his boyfriend, a dancer, was public school educated – nor is it a critical comment on them, or a hankering after greener pastures. It’s something far more interesting. There’s a detachment. He cites the ideas of the German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht, who had actors directly address the audience to break the fourth wall and prevent them relating to – and therefore from empathising with – characters and their actions, from believing the fantasy before their eyes.

“I think I’ve been quite lucky with how I’ve gone about my education,” Stokey-Daley says. “But I know for a fact now, looking back, that there is just a disparity, between the access to those hierarchies and cultures.” He pauses again. “I think I look back to myself at home. And if I didn’t make those few, really quick, off-the-cuff, instinctive decisions, I wouldn’t be here now. I wouldn’t have been able to have access. And it kind of makes me sad.”

But sadness isn’t the overriding emotion evoked by Stokey-Daley’s work. It’s joyous, uplifting, thought-provoking, unique. His examinations of class aren’t intended to skewer ideas of elitism, nor do they celebrate them. Rather, they embrace universal values of community, togetherness, friendship – exactly what Stokey-Daley experienced as part of the NYT, regardless of structures of class. In a sense, they are also celebrations of the freedoms afforded in 2022, when you can dress freely without worrying about Nancy Mitford snubbing her nose at you. These clothes are also a reflection of the tenacious will of a young, working-class designer determined to impart his vision on the world; a creative with something new to express. That is what draws the likes of Styles and Fleetwood to his door – as well as men, young and old, looking to wear something different and maybe to dream a bit. The theatrics set the stage for his vision, but it’s the clothes that really do the talking.

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