“I’m not a fashion person”: Daniel Del Valle is the LVMH Prize nominee approaching creativity differently
Anders Christian Madsen meets Daniel Del Valle, the emerging avant-garde designer whose wearable artworks tell stories through craft.
Look 18 from Thevxlley’s first collection — a ceramic bustier with different kinds of orchids climbing along its structure — is still growing in a terrarium in Daniel del Valle’s north London house. The designer had already been cultivating the living garment for two years before it hit the runway. “The passage of time has changed the piece a lot. The orchids have been growing and blooming and dying. I get a lot of pleasure out of seeing that,” he says. The Spanish artist’s debut show at London fashion week in February was a rare moment of wild creativity in a time when business-driven “wearability” is dominating the runways.
With no interest in selling ready-to-wear, the 31-year-old multi- talent is purely in it for the craft. Make that crafts, plural. Presented in Ladbroke Hall, his show comprised some 20 artisanal disciplines, from ceramics and mosaics, to botany and baking. One bustier was fashioned from a real vase with painted blue flowers, another covered in clusters of snail shells. A pristine top made of carpet and encrusted with floral formations of chewed gum was inspired by the grimy rugs of London pubs, and a surreal gown was converted from a tablecloth, with its floral-vase centerpiece still stuck to it.
“Since I was young, I’ve been moved by obsessions,” del Valle says over some floriated crudités at The Roof Gardens, a fitting spread for the artist, who created his first collection while working in various florists across London. He eventually worked for Paul Thomas — one of the city’s finest — before dedicating himself fully to Thevxlley. A pun on his surname, it’s styled like the Latin names of flowers that no one can pronounce. He refers to the business as a project rather than a label. “I’ll go into something like mosaic, and I’ll learn how to do it and find materials and make a piece. I have to prove to myself that I’m capable of doing it,” he says of his approach.
PORTRAIT BY SANDRA MICKIEWICZ
I’m not a fashion person. I don’t know anyone’s name, and I’m a very shy person, so having to sell myself to all these people who I didn’t know was very interesting. I enjoyed my conversation with Jonathan Anderson. With most people, I had to explain what things were made of. With him, I didn’t have to.
DANIEL DEL VALLE
PHOTOGRAPHY KITO MUÑOZ
AW26 RUNWAY ‘THE VXLLEY’
Born in 1995, del Valle grew up in a small town outside Seville. His upbringing was colored by a culture of craftsmanship. His father is a baker, his mother “a master in crochet,” and his grandmother taught him embroidery from an early age. His family’s influences appeared in the collection. A dress was embroidered with elements of Spanish Manila shawls, and another look was crafted from a bergère chair adorned with inherited porcelain flowers handmade by his grandmother a century ago. One creation featured a crochet top made in collaboration with his mother, and the final look adapted her actual wedding dress embellished with wax flowers.
If there’s an air of surrealism to it all, it reached a high point in a top constructed from bread. Baked with his father in his giant oven in Spain, it took five tries to get the piece right. The bread was burnished, but del Valle says it will deteriorate with time. “I love that. I love the memories attached to those garments.” In an age where newness and disposability go hand-in-hand, Thevxlley is about permanence and emotional value. The designer assembled a top from fragments of pipes he found by the Thames, discarded in the Victorian era. “It’s so romantic to think about all the mouths that touched those pipes, and all the conversations they had.”
Del Valle can’t replicate his looks for personal orders. Instead, he makes bespoke pieces for a burgeoning fan base, for museums and — he hints — the stage. His creations are too fragile to ship for fashion shoots, and when he was nominated for the LVMH Prize this year, he had to take them to Paris by car to meet the judges. The event served as his industry baptism of fire. “I’m not a fashion person. I don’t know anyone’s name, and I’m a very shy person, so having to sell myself to all these people who I didn’t know was very interesting. I enjoyed my conversation with Jonathan Anderson. With most people, I had to explain what things were made of. With him, I didn’t have to. He knew straight away,” he says of the Dior designer. Another fashion idol is Martin Margiela. “His approach to fashion felt very like mine: How a piece of paper can become a garment. That approach to fashion has disappeared since he left.” Thevxlley’s ethos has a lot in common with the traces of time and the presence of soul that imbued the work of Margiela, whose natural progression following his fashion career was to become an artist. “For me, Thevxlley is a place to be completely free. Maybe I don’t do more than one collection. Maybe the next thing will be furniture. Maybe I’ll do a film. And I can work for other brands,” del Valle says. Like his skills, the options are infinite.
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