After delighting crowds at LFW with his utterly romantic SS22 collection, 2022 LVMH Prize finalist S.S. Daley is unveiling a new documentary that takes us behind the scenes of that very show.

Working closely with NWSPK, a production team helmed by fashion film directors Sam Hooper and Glen Travis, the trio has produced a film that peeks behind the curtains of a modern-day runway, featuring interviews with a flurry of collaborators, movement directors and actors as they anticipate the big day. Kicking off with a cosy chat between the Liverpudlian designer and NEWGEN chair, Sarah Mower, the duo first take us back to the designer’s delicate, class-conscious FW20 debut, framing his work in the context of class and Etonian style.

Then, we pan to the focused rehearsals of the collection, a navigation of queerness and class in the British public school system. Giving a new uniform to the modern dandy, Daley subverts school uniforms with high cuts and wide legs endorsed by Harry Styles, and dreams of romantic trips to the duck pond in the collection’s standout chunky knits. The designer goes on to construct an entire narrative arc for each character in the three-part production, drawing on his theatrical roots as part of the National Youth Theatre to bring the designs to life.

The story then finds itself choreographed over a gruelling ten-day period of workshops and rehearsals, which invited the participation and honesty of Daley’s tight-knit community, some of whom detail their own experiences growing up in an unequal class system. By the time we reach the film’s climactic end, we’ve been through therapy, gotten a cameo from stylist Harry Lambert and overheard tons of chaotic planning for lookbooks and press releases that manage to stress us out, too. Thankfully, this is all boxed off by the delightful sounds of Kate Bush, a mainstay on the speakers of Daley’s design studio whose Cloudbusting ended up scoring Daley’s FW22 collection – classic knows classic, after all.

Read our coverage from the S.S. Daley FW22 show here.

Revisit our in-conversation between Steven Stokey-Daley and Josh O’Connor.