Daniel Gayle has a CV that reads: globetrotter. The 38-year-old designer started out in production under Jonathan Saunders in London, helped launch Victoria Beckham’s fashion label during a six-year stint at the brand, before heading to New York to work for Phillip Lim, finally winding up in Paris at Kenzo. But his latest project is closer to home: in April, he launched his own brand, DenzilPatrick, from his studio in Peckham, south London, where he grew up.
Gayle is quick to point out that the peripatetic approach to gaining industry experience was vital. “I trained as a dancer, so I didn’t come with all the same qualifications as my contemporaries,” he recalls. A slow-fashion mindset also marked him out. He ultimately stepped down from Kenzo just before Covid hit, feeling equal parts frazzled and puzzled about how to tackle fashion’s sustainability challenge. “When you’re working with upcycling, or recycling, or slow fashion – it can’t fit to the old mould,” he says. “Everyone has to be willing to think new.”
The pandemic allowed him the space and time to rethink what a sustainable fashion label might look like. It also made him realise it needed to be personal. “This job kept me so far away from my family to start with,” he says. “They didn’t really understand the fashion world. It was just, ‘Oh, Daniel’s really busy and travelling and stressed’.” From an ethical standpoint, he wanted rigorous sourcing principles and a UK focus. From an aesthetic one, his starting point was his two grandfathers. His paternal grandfather Denzil was a Jamaican carpenter who emigrated to the UK in 1955, played the saxophone and wore colourful string vests. On his mother’s side, Patrick was an Irish navy man who settled in the UK in around 1948, was a little stern, and wore thick, cable-knit cardigans. DenzilPatrick is a “kind of fantasy mash-up” of their wardrobes bolstered by the make-do-and-mend mentality that characterised Gayle’s childhood.
DenzilPatrick’s sourcing is impressive in scope and detail. Reimagined string vests have been made from hand-assembled crochet doilies sourced from a small-scale doily maker in the north of England and batch-dyed hot pink in London. Cashmere sweaters comprise surplus cashmere panels, dyed and sewn together in Gayle’s studio, then embroidered with neon yarns by Alice Richardson, a Royal Academy graduate based in east London. Argyle vests – a favourite of Granddad Denzil and the Caribbean community whom Gayle recalls playing dominoes in the Gowlett Arms pub in Peckham when he was a boy – have been reworked in dead-stock fleece with sportswear finishing on the seams. Preloved denim has been given new life with prints and trims. Deadstock RAF shirts have been primped with fresh collars and vibrant hues.
Innovative and esoteric, each piece feels like a happy one-off – not least because a family’s history is knitted into the fibres. “This project is about memory – not nostalgia, but it’s that spirit that I think is very special,” says Gayle. “Maybe in 50 years, as London becomes incredibly expensive, we might lose those stories, those lived moments, those experiences of young families and generations before them.” He smiles as he relates how his Mum helped to ironed all the denim, with his father and brothers dropping by to build more shelves for the studio. “It isn’t just about me and I wouldn’t want it to be.”
DenzilPatrick Lookbook Photography by Connor T. Egan