SS Daley Spring 2025 Ready-to-Wear Collection

However much Stokey-Daley has been showered with awards, he is a down-to-earth, working-class Northern Irishman by nature and hasn't let any of it go to his head: he hasn't even won the 2022 LVMH Prize, and yesterday he added the Queen Elizabeth II Award for Design to his trophy collection. “People ask me, 'Why are you doing womenswear now?'” he explained, taking the bull by the horns. “It's like the economy has collapsed, everyone is struggling. But I think there's a simple answer. I started this brand during a pandemic and it feels like a pretty bleak time in the universe right now. But I've had an idea in my head for some time. And London is a resilient place.”

Meaning: He was searching for a logic, a bridge between his menswear aesthetic and the politics and womenswear behind it. Born Hannah Gluckstein into the wealthy family of the Lyons Corner Tea Room, Gluck cut her hair at 21, started wearing men's clothes, halved her middle name and ran away to Cornwall to live with a group of like-minded friends. Stokey-Daley's principle of alienating English classics found its way into the “feminine” in the form of floral pleated skirts and pixelated blue roses on beaded handbags, and into the “masculine” in the form of a “cutting suit” and a white tuxedo with pintucks (a slight repeat of the detail of Harry Styles' “Golden” shirtfront).

Floral decorations were placed under practical trench coats with large collars. “You just see the skirt as if you were sweeping the floor. In motion, it's really impactful,” said Stokey-Daley. Of course, dogs were included: a Chelsea lady-style silk headscarf with black and white pointers printed on a blouse and knee-length skirt, then painted on a sweater. “We have to have moments of humor!” said the designer, adding: “Constance Spry was a very matrimonial lady from middle England. Which I kind of love! Gluck had commissioned flower arrangements for her house, so to speak. I think it went on from there. I think the wonderful thing is this juxtaposition, the extremely contrasting nature of Gluck with Constance's flowers, which Gluck painted in a super-stylized way. And so,” he added, looking serious, “this collection is Gluck on top and Constance on the bottom.”

Stokey-Daley also thought carefully about how he would design his womenswear before diving into the work. “Our team is myself, Leo, Sam, Kirsten and Clem – and Kirsten and Clem are both queer women who have had a lot of input here.” He also consulted his female makeup and hair team. “For me, it's really important in fittings and everything that we have women there to show us how it looks. Honestly, my biggest fear when I started here was that I didn't want to fit either of the two fashion stereotypes – being a gay man who doesn't dress women or misincorporates women, which we still see today. And I didn't want to ignore the female form either. I want to listen to my friends: what do they want to wear?”

SS Daley exudes an English can-do attitude – there's something ominous about it, a sense of humour that always comes to London's rescue even in the darkest of times. Standing amidst the glorious English floral arrangements at the end of his show – surrounded by Constance Fry's original vases – he put it this way: “At times like these, I think the saying applies: 'In concrete, roses can grow from the cracks.'”