Sir Ian McKellen opened a London Fashion Week show

After winning the LVMH Prize and being named Best Emerging Designer at the British Fashion Awards, Steven Stokey-Daley is part of the new crop of young British creatives who are reviving London Fashion Week. Yesterday, there was a new career highlight: that Ian McKellen first opened the show for S.S. Daley's FW23 collection and then accompanied him by reciting Tennyson's poem The Coming of Arthur live. From what Stokey-Daley told Vogue, it was actually McKellen who contacted him to offer to collaborate on his show. The legendary performer of Gandalf and Magneto, by the way, had already worn Stokey-Daley's clothes in 2021, for an Observer Magazine editorial.

S.S. Daley's FW23 collection adhered to a nautical imagery, evoked as much in the berets and cabans as in the venue walls, in the name of the show (The Ninth Wave, from the Kate Bush song), and even in the poetry read by McKellen. Married to this imagery were suggestions related to the queer-marine world, a narrative microclimate populated by Fassbinder's film Querelle, many of Tom of Finland's drawings, Gaultier's sailors, and those photographed by Pierre et Gilles. The collection, however, was less about evoking homoerotic suggestions as much as it was about pulling from seafaring uniform and historical and cultural archetypes representative lines, colors, and individual garments and then giving them a more modern and conceptual twist that carries forward that narrative stratagem of exploiting the signifiers of specific romantic imagery, linked to British culture and history, to create a continuity with the present by making explicit what was implicit and modernizing, subverting, the details and forms of tradition.