Designer Steven Stokey-Daley: ‘King Charles in his safari jacket is on my moodboard’
“It feels like coming full circle,” said Steven Stokey-Daley as he was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Award for British Design by Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh at the Royal Academy in London on Thursday.
“The world which the royals inhabit – the codes of the British aristocracy and blue blood society – has always been a huge inspiration to me, so it feels quite momentous to be receiving an award that was set up by the late Queen,” said the 27-year-old. He was referring to the moment at London Fashion Week in 2018 when Queen Elizabeth II made a surprise appearance to bestow designer Richard Quinn with the inaugural award that bore her name.
For this outing, it was her daughter-in-law who did the honours, which was fitting as the menswear designer is set to debut his first women’s show at London Fashion Week on Friday. Can we expect a leading royal in one of his romantic designs?
“Of course, I’d love to dress the royal women. Perhaps the Princess of Wales will like what she sees and come in for a fitting, who knows?” said the Liverpudlian who started his label during the pandemic and has gone on to become a leading fashion talent. Earlier this year, it was announced that Harry Styles – a long-time fan – had become a minority shareholder in the S.S. Daley business while last February, Sir Ian McKellen performed a Tennyson poem on the catwalk at Stokey-Daley’s autumn/winter 2023 show.
But aside from the celebrity adoration, it’s the royals that feed his fashion imagination. While it’s a badge of honour for any British fashion designer to dress Catherine, it’s her late mother-in-law Princess Diana that Stokey-Daley’s long been enamoured with. “She had this sense of style that was almost at the cutting edge, but never going over that edge. She understood how to convey a message with style in her own unique way. There’s an image of her in a tartan jacket that I particularly love for its sense of Britishness.”
The King is also part of the S.S. Daley style lexicon. “King Charles has been such a champion of British menswear throughout the years, and images of him in his youth – either in knits in Scotland or in his iconic safari jacket – are part of my moodboard,” said Stokey-Daley.
The designer has built a reputation for taking those upright style traditions – Etonian boater hats, black tie tops and tails straight from Saltburn – and skewering them with a twisted sense of what British classicism and class systems mean.
He focuses on using dead stock and recycled fabrics to make his beautifully crafted, embroidered shirts making him an an excellent example of how fashion designers today are responding to the environmental crisis.
Can we expect the newly bearded Prince of Wales in one of those kitten and floral print designs sometime soon? Well, nothing defines the aristocracy like a healthy dose of eccentricity.
