S.S. Daley to be guest designer at next edition of Pitti Uomo

British designer Steven Stokey-Daley's S.S. Daley brand will be the next guest designer to show at Pitti Uomo in Florence on 9-12 January 2024.

Guest designer at the world's leading menswear show Pitti Uomo is considered a high honour and the choice of Stokey-Daley, who is not yet 30 and only started his label in 2020, proves the impact he has already made.

A graduate of Westminster University. Stokey-Daley revisits and dismantles typical ideas of British Heritage viewing them through the lens of his Liverpool working class upbringing.

He shot to prominence with his graduate collection, which riffed on the peculiarities of 1900s British aristocratic dressing. This caught the attention of eminent names in the fashion industry such as pre-eminent fashion critic and British Fashion Council Ambassador for Emerging Talent Sarah Mower.

Leading stylist Harry Lambert also championed the collection and dressed British musician Harry Styles in pieces from it for the ‘Golden’ music video.

Stokey-Daley made his London Fashion Week debut in September 2021 and was named as a recipient of the British Fashion Council’s NEWGEN initiative in the same year. A year later Stokey-Daley was awarded the LVMH Prize for Young Designers in June 2022. This was followed by receiving the Foundation Award at the British Fashion Awards in December of the same year.

Stokey-Daley recently collaborated with fellow British brand Mulberry but for Pitti Uomo he will be showing his ‘made in Britain’ collection with a catwalk show-event staged in his own characteristic style, Pitti has said.

S.S. Daley X Mulberry

"Steven Stokey-Daley transforms the British Upper Class into a Queer fashion fantasy. Despite his youth, Steven’s project is characterised by an expressive maturity, an amused and eccentric reinterpretation of British Heritage, an indifference to gender stereotypes and a commitment to sustainability.

"We love his talent for revising the archetypes of menswear, the uniforms of the most exclusive British high society public schools, capturing the signs of the times and extravagantly subverting everything with a subtle irony, playfully amplifying the volumes of his garments, fooling around with the details, working with unexpected fabrics and floral prints. Then there is the almost literary character of his visions that recall the incurably eccentric characters with impeccable manners in Evelyn Waugh’s novels.

"He is certainly no stranger to adventure, this well-educated boy from Liverpool: from his success in dressing global popstar Harry Styles to the prestige of the LVMH Young Fashion Designer prize. Inviting Steven to Florence means dedicating another adventure to him that will be shared with the international audience at Pitti Uomo. Giving him an opportunity to showcase his stories and project them towards the future," said Pitti Immagine special events co-ordinator Francesca Tacconi.

"I’m honoured to have the opportunity to take S.S.DALEY’s manifesto of modern British storytelling to Pitti Uomo, the epicentre of menswear design," Stokey-Daley added.

Past guest designers at Pitti Uomo have included icons such as Giorgio Armani, Vivienne Westwood, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Dries Van Noten, Yohji Yamamoto, Virgil Abloh and Raf Simons.