Having begun this year with a full collection at Pitti Uomo in Florence and following it up with his first womenswear collection at London Fashion Week in September, Steven Stokey-Daley has just released his third collection of the year in the form of his SS25 menswear collection. In a lookbook shot on location in Margate, the seaside town that has in recent years become a new colony for artists priced out of London, we see Daley revisiting some of the codes of his Pitti collection, such as the clothing of upper-class private schools, but through an English rather than Italian lens.

The linchpin for his new collection was Brighton Rock, both the original novel by Graham Greene and its 2010 film adaptation starring Sam Riley and Andrea Riseborough. The result is a collection that mixes British seaside imagery with the sartorial codes of the Mods, as they were presented (purposefully anachronistically) in 2010’s Brighton Rock.

“I went back to my original research alongside looking at this Brighton Rock protagonist,” Daley says of the collection. “Looking at athletic uniform more closely, it became about taking Pinkies’ [Brighton Rock‘s protagonist] uniform and shortening shorts, or tightening cardigans which felt like an inverse approach to my initial developments with clothes back in 2020 which was more about adding more – this was about reduction.”

It can be easily seen that this collection is more obviously fitted than Daley’s previous menswear collections which often featured huge billowing trousers. Here, items like jackets and coats are more cinched and shorts are worn high and belted. The trousers of the suits, whilst still far from drain pipes, are pleated and straight cut. As always, Daley has included some fun typographic pieces, such as a t-shirt that reads “I May Not Be Rich but I’m One Hell of a Tap Dancer”.