The Liverpudlian designer’s new campaign is about “the British wool farmers wearing British wool, and the bonds between men”
For his London Fashion Week debut last year, instead of staging a conventional runway show, Steven Stokey-Daley put on a play with actors from the National Youth Theatre – of which he had been a part of when he was a teenager. “There’s an emotional response to theatre that exists in the realm of fashion,” he explains. “I believe the world in which SS Daley exists is built on that combination.”
Ever-intrigued by the sartorial quirks of the British upper classes, Daley has previously referenced classic British films like Brideshead Revisited and Maurice, along with the regal public school uniforms worn by boys at Harrow. His S/S22 collection featured boater hats stuffed with flowers; richly patterned clothing that echoed the opulent furnishings of stately homes, and jumpers embroidered with images of garden plants and green-headed mallard ducks.
Daley has now released his first-ever campaign, which paints the S/S22 collection in a completely new light, taking it from an urban setting to a rural one. Shot in Cornwall by Laurence Ellis and styled by Harry Lambert – who put Harry Styles in a number of SS Daley looks for his 2020 music video Golden – the campaign casts a humorous, sensual eye on British farmers and sheep shearers in Cornwall. “There’s more of a conversation here about the craft of the collection,” he says. “The British wool farmers wearing British wool, and the bonds between men.”
After casting director Nachum Shonn discovered a community of sheep shearers in Cornwall, Daley and his team visited their farm and observed the peaceful rhythms of their daily lives, along with “their contribution to a circular wool industry.” In one image, a muscular farmer wearing an old fashioned wrestling singlet holds up a freshly sheared sheep’s fleece, the layers of wool as soft and light as candy floss. Elsewhere in the campaign, farmers sling sheep over their shoulders, pose with herding dogs, or get undressed atop piles of hay. “The show presented the clothes in the light from which they were designed – the public school realm,” says Daley. “With the campaign, we took away those characters, those references and threw them into a different reality.”