Men are more experimental NOW

Acelebrity stylist seems like the dream job but there is a lot of hard work behind images of stars on magazine covers and the red carpet. Luke Day, a celebrated stylist for over 25 years, knows all about the grind behind the glamour. That’s not to say he doesn’t love his work – he has enjoyed a stellar career at titles including GQ – where he was fashion director from 2017 to 2021 and is now editor of GQ Style – Arena Homme and Attitude magazine while also styling for brands like Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana. He has also styled Robbie Williams, Paul Mescal, Jody Comer, Timothée Chalamet and Daniel Craig.

All this means a lot of searching for the perfect pieces to make celebrities shine. As a result, Luke is always on alert for ways to find clothing. In that realm, technology is playing an increasingly big role in how we buy fashion, discover trends and interact with style via our phones. Luke was in Dublin recently to launch the new Samsung Galaxy S24 phone, which has Google’s innovative new Circle To Search AI embedded.

Luke’s enthusiasm for Circle To Search is understandable – it makes his work of sourcing stylish clothes much simpler. ‘It’s life-changing,’ he admits. ‘It’s a really incredible piece of AI that I’ve been using in my job as well. You see somebody wearing something, you’re like, oh my god, where would I find that, and you just take a picture of it. Instantly it gives you options of alternatives – it’s brilliant.

‘Imagine if you saw Kim Kardashian wearing a vintage Mugler dress or something, you could take a picture of it and it would find you that original piece or it would find you items that are similar to it.

For example, a musician that I work with sent me a picture saying, “I’ve seen this coat but it’s from an old season. Can you find it for me?” I just did it this morning, and it came up with two websites that it’s still available on.’ In Dublin, Luke showcased the app’s convenience by using it to source pieces to recreate looks inspired by 1990s style. He says that Circle To Search is great for finding vintage or special pieces, which he personally loves. ‘I feel like the quality in fast fashion is so different now because it is produced so quickly,’ he observes. ‘I just love the vintage pieces, it makes it more special, it makes it more exclusive and it gives you more individuality because it’s not so readily available. You’re not going to a party and there’s going to be five other people wearing the same thing.

‘That’s still part of the magic, and yet there’s still also the hunt. I feel like that is really exciting and I actually feel this Circle To Search with Google, it actually makes it even more exciting,’ he says.

Luke says vintage is increasingly popular too with celebrity clients with a more sustainable approach to red carpet dressing. ‘Recently, I spoke with a musician called Self Esteem [Rebecca Lucy Taylor] and when she went to the British Fashion Awards we did everything from Vestiaire Collective so the whole look was created using vintage pieces,’ he says of the pre-owned fashion site.

Luke’s enthusiastic love of fashion is inherited from his gran, who was a seamstress. He was sewing from a young age and didn’t do A-levels but instead went straight on to a fashion design course. He then ‘kind of pivoted more into styling’ and has worked for magazines for over 25 years combining a ‘mixture of working with fashion brands and clients and lots of editorial’.

‘I do a really nice mix of things,’ he says. ‘I do lots of brand work and I have my talent roster – I do everyone from Robbie Williams to Westlife – and then I do costume design too. I’m doing the Take That tour at the moment so I’m designing the costumes for that.’

The diversity of his work is what keeps Luke motivated. ‘Sometimes when you are in the studio, you get pigeonholed, but I’ve always created this kind of balance and the variety keeps it really exciting,’ he says.

Over his career, Luke has seen thousands of trends come and go. For him, the biggest evolution is in men’s style now. ‘Men are way more experimental, braver with choices and I think because we get so many influencers now, there is so much more readily available,’ he says. ‘I think fashion reaches more people now as well. Before, fashion shows were just for the fashion industry and now you see the content everywhere because celebrities are also at those shows and everyone’s posting it, so it’s a combination of different things.’

As a style icon who favours short shorts, skirts, cowboy hats, and a signature lush mullet and retro sideburns, Luke is also an inspiration for an adventurous sense of style. ‘Obviously, there’s lots of musicians and actors like Timothée Chalamet and Harry Styles that have major influence on young boys,’ he says. ‘Even when you see those boys on Love Island wearing pearls, that would never have happened even five years ago, I don’t feel.

‘When you look at Barry Keoghan doing his red-carpet look, the one where he had all the brooches on and all of those kinds of little feminine details, it’s so interesting to

see somebody being really bold and experimenting and really very confident with it.

‘The world is definitely opening up right now to people being more individual and I think there’s more tribes than ever, in a way. I feel that also kind of lends itself to people being more open with their style.’

He admits stars have a very clear vision of their image now. ‘I do actually find that quite a few of these new or younger talents, they come to you with their own Pinterest of things they love,’ he says. ‘In older days, I used to work with X-Factor finalists and it would be very much down to you to come up with the concept of how they should look, whereas nowadays these young talents come to you with an idea of, “this is who I want to be, I need you to help me facilitate that”. That’s really exciting because it’s so collaborative.’

Fashion is now mainstream thanks to technology and phones have been central to this. ‘We can all be content creators so therefore we want to be able to edit our pictures in a certain way and find the fashion to be in those pictures,’ Luke says. ‘I feel that the way we look has become so much more important because it’s so visual that everybody is documenting their lives.

‘It’s fun and exciting for that young generation to be able to document and it’s how they connect with tribes. I definitely follow people whose style I admire and I’ve learned from them. It’s all through my phone.’

The new series of Samsung Galaxy S24 phones is available now.