The British designer Daniel Gayle’s family has been a profound influence on his label Denzil Patrick since he launched it in 2020. Gayle has used his brand to pay loving homage to his Irish and Jamaican heritage; Denzil and Patrick are the first names of his paternal and maternal grandfathers respectively. Yet for his spring 2023 collection (his third, or his fifth, if you include a couple of capsules) he looked to the more immediate past—his own, growing up in ’90s London.
The 39-year-old Gayle has taken on what many of us would be positively unnerved by: going back to being 16 years old. (I know that I, for one, broke out in a sweat as I typed that.) In particular, he’s returned to the summer he was that age, a time when everything changed for him: He left school, came out, and discovered how clothes can reflect who you are and who you want to be in ways unimaginable before, like suddenly flexing a previously unused muscle and then wondering how you ever lived without it. “It felt like anything was possible,” he says of that time, “and it only lasted that summer, that feeling.” In light of this, he called the collection London Belongs To Me; the idea that the city—and life—is yours for the taking and the making.
This is a highly personal collection, full of subjective experience along with excellent and imaginative clothes. The last moments of his school life are recalled in the use of uniform tropes. Blazers, embroidered on the back with a blown-up version of a school badge, or printed on the front with the kind of number you’d wear on a cross-country run. Sports kits worn with jackets and school ties, just as Gayle and his teenage cohorts used to do, or tracksuits tailored with a stronger, more definitive line, and all mixed with Gola sneakers—starting from the feet up, the eternal solution to personalizing one’s school uniform. (Incidentally, much of the research for all this came from snaps taken by the designer on disposable cameras, that pre-smartphone way of recording your life and experiences.)
There are also particularly good brightly colored anoraks, with zippers running down the sleeves, designed to be transformed at their wearer’s whims, the result of a cannily observed memory of how one of his classmates used to unselfconsciously and instinctively knot and fold his coat around him. (That didn’t just happen at Gayle’s school; at mine someone wore his nylon parka hanging off his shoulders as if it was Balenciaga haute couture. That someone wasn’t me, by the way.)
Yet more than invoking his own memories of growing up, Gayle also provides a thoughtful and heartfelt depiction of British schooling that mainstream fashion hasn’t paid a whole lot of attention to; we’re all too familiar with the kind of halcyon images of privilege à la Eton et al, and often from designers who aren’t from the UK, but we rarely if ever see the kind of inner city public high schools that Gayle (not to mention many of us) actually attended.
“We know that story and it’s a lovely story,” he says of the famed British upper class schools, “and I suddenly thought, why don’t I lean into my own experience?” That also means his life away from education, like going out to the legendary London club G-A-Y that summer of 1999—and the kind of things he wore out at night, such as the high street approximation of Prada Sport with a techno fabric top in a shade of pink that made its way into this collection, a color dubbed ‘rhubarb.’ “A guy on his phone said: ‘I’ve just seen a pink trash bag walk by’,” recalls Gayle of his late ’90s look, laughing. “But I felt amazing, and to this day I still remember that feeling. It’s hard to find those feelings again.”
One way to do it is to locate them in your own work: Your own intention about the kind of designer you want to be, and at the same time, the person you want your designs to reflect. (Gayle has continued to work as sustainably as he can, with regenerated cashmere, and using embroiderers in Delhi for some particularly nifty shorts covered in sequins made of recycled soda cans.) That designers have been tuning into their own perspectives on the world, and their own very personal and individual paths, has been nothing but good for fashion; more honesty, more soul, more emotion, all of which Gayle tick, tick, ticks with Denzil Patrick.
When he started to work on his spring 2023 with his husband (who designs the graphics) and a couple of assistants, the idea was to have fun—and throw out all the preconceived notions of how things need to be done. The brief was to embrace being small, hold on to who you are, express your own values. “With this third collection, that’s what we’ve come to,” Gayle says. “It’s why I feel emancipation both for me as 16-year old Daniel, but also the emancipation of my job today. We made the collection we wanted to make. I’ve thrown the rule book away, because I don’t want to feel confined to anything because I’m just exploring, and what makes it legitimate is that I’m doing it.”
