If you’re looking for a sit-up-and-pay-attention moment from this London Fashion Week, then Daniel del Valle, who showcased his designs under the moniker Thevxlley, delivered it. The self-taught artist and designer, who hails from southern Spain and holds a day job as a top London florist, delivered a surprise standout collectsion titled The Narcissist. It’s rare to find someone able to blur the line between fashion and sculpture without descending into gimmicks—even rarer for a debut collectsion to have this level of technical accomplishment.
Held in an airy, light-filled room at west London’s creative arts hub Ladbroke Hall, the models floated out to strains of classical piano, with fresh tulips and sweet peas tied to their shoes, leaving trails of trodden petals and delicate stems in their wake. The consistent presence of ceramics throughout whispered of del Valle’s Andalusian heritage: a chest plate with colorful blooms, a woven vest made of dozens of small pots that clinked together as they passed, or a midnight blue vase (complete with spider gerberas poking out the top) that appeared to have been squished by a ribbon tying it around the model’s chest.
Other looks, such as a top tufted with greenery—like a living wall on your chest—or a mosaic T-shirt featuring a still life of a flower pot, crackled with ingenuity and had the front row leaning forward in their seats to drink in every detail. Arguably the most impressive series of looks was a trio of tops in the shape of urns: one of blue-and-white ceramic, one encrusted with shells, and another like a shelving unit featuring miniature flower-filled vases. Despite the weight and unusual proportions of some of the pieces, they’d been thoughtfully engineered to sit on the body in a way that somehow didn’t appear uncomfortable to wear.
Threaded through the collectsion, del Valle explained, were dozens of nods to his private pastimes and family histories, from the floral embroideries dripping with ribbons that were an homage to his grandmother (she taught him to sew as a child) to the top featuring loaves of bread as a nod to his baker father. “When I was younger, I used to work with him in the bakery,” del Valle said. “So we did this piece in collaboration.” Having made the collectsion over the course of three years on evenings and weekends—often going through many iterations, and an extensive process of trial and error, before deciding a piece was truly finished—it was about as personal as it gets. How did he carve out the time and resources to create all this, while holding down a day job? “To be honest with you, making is my meditation,” he said. “So even if I am exhausted, the action of making, doing things with my hands is very meditative. So I’m always doing something, and it helps me.” And where does he see his designs living? In a fashion store? A museum? “Ideally, I see the pieces in a gallery space or museum. I know it’s a fashion collectsion, but I consider the pieces as sculptures, not garments. And when I designed them, I was also thinking how they would work as an object, not just as clothes.”
As a result, del Valle remains uncertain what exactly his next move will be—though he already has an eye on making furniture and he’s unlikely to start producing seasonal fashion collectsions. “To be honest with you, everything has happened so quickly that I haven’t really thought about it,” he said. “I just want to feel free, and I don’t want to close any door. So I’m happy to see what comes from here.”
