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—this was the essence of Steven Stokey-Daley’s show, as one of this season’s guest designers at Pitti Uomo. 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.
For Stokey-Daley had arrived from London with a lot to celebrate: his just-announced minority-investment boost from Harry Styles and an opportunity to show what he’s made of to a very grown-up international menswear industry audience.
One of the luxuries of the Pitti invitation is being able to choose from spectacular venues in the city. He’d intentionally picked an awesomely painted renaissance hall in the Palazzo Vecchio for its historic resonance. “Because it’s where there was a famous meeting of 500 Florentines, with the idea of founding a democracy,” he said before the show. “I just kind of think that the idea of democracy in Italy is a really nice thread [that relates] to how we sort of unpick ideas of the class system in the UK.”
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 in his book The Last Hurrah. “It was wild, debauched, and crazy—around the time that Boris Johnson was a student.”
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—and, possibly, the great yellow oilskin jacket and sou’wester.
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 (it’s becoming a whole, fully accessorized wardrobe now), but just always a little cleverly, quirkily left of the generically classic. It includes his genius for the playful sweater—this season, there are gamboling lambs and a bunny, inspired by children’s sleepwear—and a whole slew of wearable items, including a continuation of his signature Oxford bags, casual chore suits, and (now) Made-in-Italy tailoring and shoes. From a designer who’s still only 27, it was a mighty way to charm and impress his audience with how far the SS Daley brand has come.
