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SS Daley is prepped for growth. On Thursday evening, the British brand took over Florence’s historic Palazzo Vecchio as one of the guest designers at trade show Pitti Uomo, marking a shift in strategy to better align with the menswear buying calendar. Shortly after the show, the brand announced investment from Harry Styles, a frequent wearer of the label via his stylist and SS Daley collaborator Harry Lambert.
Styles has taken a minority stake in the brand, for an undisclosed amount. “Harry and I have a shared vision for the future of SS Daley and we look forward to this new chapter together as we focus on brand longevity and scaling the business into a modern, British heritage house,” said founder Steven Stokey-Daley in a statement.
The Pitti slot forms part of a strategy to push the brand forward. SS Daley has been a mainstay of London Fashion Week since its launch in 2020, but Stokey-Daley took last season off to focus on developing its offer, including the 35 looks shown this week in Florence. “I didn’t want to get too stuck in the London rhythm of showing every season,” he says. “We wanted to try something new where there’s a bigger [men’s] buyer turnout. We’re not sure what’s next yet, we’re just seeing how it goes.”
Two recent accolades — in 2022, he scooped both the LVMH Prize and the British Fashion Council (BFC) Foundation Award — have provided a healthy pot of funding (a combined £400,000) to scale the label, move to a new studio and develop categories like footwear, which he debuted in three styles at the Pitti show, each riffing off a classic British shoe: the loafer, Mary Jane and brogue.
The Pitti Uomo guest designer slot has been a launch pad or amplification moment for some of the industry’s most prominent names including Raf Simons, Jonathan Anderson, Grace Wales Bonner, Erl and Martine Rose. This season, the event invited both Stokey-Daley and Italian menswear label Magliano to show, presenting their more fluid take on menswear.
The morning of the Florence show, Stokey-Daley is relaxed, considering he’d only arrived in the city at 10pm the night before, after some last-minute casting in Milan. “There’s been a lot to contend with in terms of logistics,” he says. “It’s been tricky getting from place to place. That’s been a big difference [between Florence and London].”
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Stokey-Daley is known for his storytelling approach, and the Pitti show was no different. Entitled “Elliot’s Room”, it was inspired by letter exchanges between two Oxford students who fell in love while sharing a dorm in 1935. The set was an abstracted dorm room, with crates stacked into pillars and stuffed with pillows inspired by Dafydd Jones’s photo series “The Last Hurrah”, while the collection featured blanket coats, pillow coats, rope-trimmed tailoring and Stokey-Daley’s characteristic eclectic knits. A notable look was a shirt with a large vertical fish motif, also appearing on the show invite. “It’s inspired by EM Forster’s [early novel] Panic Room, about a British boy who visits Italy for the first time and has a sexual awakening,” says Stokey-Daley.
The designer, who had never been to Florence before he began location scouting for the show last summer, was heavily inspired by the city, as well as the literature around it. “Florence is like one giant gallery to me, it’s so beautiful, I feel like there’s art in every corner. We actually changed the structure of the collection after that trip; we let that inform the collection.” He chose Palazzo Vecchio, the city’s town hall, because it has a history of democracy that relates to the designer’s examination of the British class system. Meanwhile the shoes, and most of the collection, were made solely in Italy this season (usually they are made across the UK, Italy and Portugal).
Before the show, Stokey-Daley’s nerves and excitement were palpable. “It’s chaos backstage, let’s talk here,” he smiled, gesturing to the set, where he’d just watched rehearsals, quietly giving notes to production. Lighting tests continued as he filmed some videos for Vogue Business, before rushing backstage to make final touches as a crowd slowly gathered outside.
Post-show, throngs of editors and buyers jostled to congratulate Stokey-Daley, even before the investment news broke. As the designer looks to scale his team and boost his retail footprint, with a Pitti guest slot, international exposure and some celebrity buzz to propel his growth ambitions, he could be golden.
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