How Nicholas Daley taps into the energy of London

The London-based menswear designer draws from the deep well of London’s eclectic music scene.

Crack Magazine has teamed up with VanMoof for I Know A Place – a four-part series exploring four European cities through the eyes of the people that inhabit them. We’re speaking to musicians and tastemakers to find out what about their city makes them feel free, and energises them to create.

We meet Nicholas Daley on an unusually bright October day that feels like a rare gift for a city that is often dreary and cold this time of year. But the sun is out and casting long shadows across Tottenham and into the windows of The Archives. The six-storey 1960s warehouse space has been taken over by a community of makers, including Daley, the menswear designer known for embracing the multiculturalism of London and its rich musical history for his eclectic namesake clothing brand.

Daley’s sartorial fingerprints can be found all over the next-generation jazz scene – musicians Shabaka Hutchings, Yussef Dayes, Nala Sinephro and Daley’s wife, Nabihah Iqbal, have all worn his designs onstage. Tapping into this community of musical peers comes naturally, he explains, as we cycle through Markfield Park in East London on his VanMoof S5, and something the city of London – with its vibrant music scene, vast subcultural history and rich multiculturalism – helps to cultivate. 

The designer has likened his creative intuition to being a sponge, and though his work draws from a melting pot of sonic references, Daley has turned time and time again to the musical history of London’s West African and Jamaican diaspora. This lends his clothes an authentic feel, one that is made to be lived in. They’re for wearing in the thick of the city – cycling through its green spaces, in the crowd at a gig, taking in the sounds of your surroundings.

“The diversity of places and spaces and people,” Daley notes. “That’s what I really want I champion in my work and celebrate.”