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 successful the LVMH Prize in 2022, and including the Queen Elizabeth II Award for Design to his trophy shelf yesterday. “People are asking me, ‘why are you doing womenswear right now?’” he said, 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 discovering a rationale, a bridge connecting his menswear aesthetics, and the politics behind it, with womenswear. Gluck was born Hannah Gluckstein into the rich Lyons Corner Tea Room household, cropped her hair at 21, wore males’s garments, minimize her second identify in half and ran away to Cornwall to stay amongst a gaggle of likeminded mates. Stokey-Daley’s precept of queering English classics sailed by into the ‘feminine’ within the type of knife-pleated flower print skirts and pixellated blue roses on beaded purses, and the ‘masculine’ a ‘morning suit’ and a white tuxedo with pin-tucked panels (a lightweight reprise of the element of Harry Styles’s “Golden” shirt-front).
Floral issues sat beneath big-collared, sensible trench coats. “You just sort of see the skirt, like sweeping the floor. It feels really effective in motion,” mentioned Stokey-Daley. There needed to be canines, too, naturally: a Chelsea woman silk headscarf-type print of black and white pointers made right into a shirt and a knee-length skirt, after which emblazoned on a sweater. “We have to have moments of humor!” mentioned the designer, including: “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, holding a straight face, “this collection is Gluck on top, and Constance underneath.”
Stokey-Daley has additionally been scrupulously aware of getting the path of his womenswear proper earlier than 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 feminine make-up and hair workforce 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 one thing doom-busting about it, a humorousness that all the time involves the rescue in London, even within the darkest occasions. As he stood amongst the gloriously English set up of flower preparations on the finish of his present—surrounded by Constance Fry’s authentic 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.’”
