Steven Stokey-Daley, 2022 winner of the LVMH Prize for Young Designers, kept his promise to offer “more of an experience than just a catwalk” for his spring show.
The designer took inspiration from the love letters between authors Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis for S.S. Daley’s Spring/Summer 2023 Collection.
Daley’s third show, again using actors from the National Youth Theatre, featured a dramatized reading of the love letters and played it on a set evoking Sackville-West’s famed white garden at Sissinghurst.
S.S. Daley’s SS23 intro: Lesbians, aristocracy, and the monarchy
The show memorably opened with a tolling bell and something which felt like a funeral procession of models clad in black, with a priest-like figure in a long black coat at its center.
“In their letters, there’s a sketch of Vita and Violet arm-in-arm, walking around the south of France. They’re all in black, Vita in a tuxedo, and it’s this moment of connection when the tone of their letters is increasingly sad when they cannot be with one another. The emotion of that moment fills this whole collection,” Daley explained in the show notes.
Of course, the death of Queen Elizabeth II also had something to do with the mournful tone of the show’s opening sequence. Daley shared, “It’s been a really interesting week. My work references the upper classes and aristocracy, and so I grapple with my personal standpoint on the monarchy, as regards to class.”
S.S. Daley’s SS23: Rabbits and ‘a cheeky youthfulness’
For the collection, the designer continued his exploration of modern power and privilege through a queer lens by showcasing new gender-less pieces.
Standout looks included cotton twill utility sets printed with florals, Calico shirts printed with 1920s seed packet illustrations, and a merino wool sweater embroidered with the image of a shed in Sackville-West’s garden.
There was also a rabbit theme running through the collection. Some models wore jersey long-sleeved muscle tops embroidered with the words “Bunny Boy,” other models wore bunny ears, and some had whiskers painted onto their faces.
(Sackville-West and Trefusis had coined a code word for writing about their forbidden love. The word they chose was “rabbit.”)
Describing the wonderful theatrical catwalk showcase at London’s St. Pancras Renaissance Hotel, Isobel Van Dyke wrote in her ES Magazine piece that “The clothes- consisting of monochromatic tailoring, loose, flowing silhouettes and larger-than-life lapels- had a cheeky youthfulness about them.”
S.S. Daley’s SS23: Lesbian love and lesbian erasure
Beyond the playfulness of the clothes, however, the show was a serious exploration of the themes of forbidden love and lesbian erasure.
At the time of Trefusis and Sackville-West’s romance, lesbianism was technically not illegal in the United Kingdom. It was a concept so taboo, it must have been a myth- society never acknowledged it as something that existed.
That is why S.S. Daley’s tribute to them—and lesbians everywhere, really—is quite touching.