Dagger Thinks Skatewear Could Use More Romance
The first thing you should know about the ragtag band of youths whom Luke Rainey considers the beating heart of his independent streetwear brand, Dagger, is that they know how to have a good time. You can see it in the scabs and sunburns they sport.
Since founding Dagger in 2020, Rainey has drawn on his experience as a queer skater kid in the working class seaside town of Portrush, Northern Ireland, to create this little cast of characters that populates a “rose-tinted-lens version” of Portrush.
For his Spring/Summer 2027 collection, “Lifestyles of the Bored and Disenfranchised,” Rainey brought back many models from last season’s runway debut at Berlin Fashion Week and built on the codes he established, this time adding an extra bit of tenderness. “Normally, we have a lot of hardcore graphics, denim, and canvas, but this time I needed some romanticism, because I'm also a very soft person and I want that to be felt," Rainey says backstage after the show.
Also forming a throughline was his own working class background: Rainey launched the brand after being laid off, with only a few hundred dollars in government benefits to his name, and built it from the ground up, from primarily hawking graphic tees and sweaters to forming a full-fledged fashion label.
During his post-show bow, Rainey wore a T-shirt that read “Employ Working Class Kids,” but this wasn’t a collection concerned with pushing any overt socioeconomic message; he was too busy having fun. Guided by a sense of unbridled optimism that only comes with youth and hot summer nights, his Dagger SS27 collection was unexpectedly joyous, considering how many models' knees were scraped and knuckles bruised.
“I wanted it to feel like the kids had been partying in the sand dunes all night long,” he explains. “It's summertime, so they've gotten their first jobs and have a little money, and they're walking home in the early morning after some new experiences, thinking about who they might become beyond where they are now.”
The collection was packed with graphic tees — a personal favorite being a blue hoodie reading “Summer Time Sadist" (a cheeky take on the Lana Del Rey track) emblazoned above a gimp mask; plus a great range of distressed denim — sometimes faded or acid-washed, other times scribbled with marker or sun-bleached with florals and stars. More quintessential skatewear came in the form of board shorts, animal-print button-ups, and canvas pants, but there were also some surprises, like a beautifully tailored jacket in a soft blue with a cinched waist and a contrasting white collar — not your usual fare from a skate brand but, then again, most skate brands aren’t staging runway shows.
Also carrying over from Dagger’s previous collection: partnerships with Apple and Vans. “I wrote Apple a letter in the beginning about growing up queer in [my hometown],” Rainey says. “I got a lot of abuse, so I'd keep my headphones in to block out the noise around me, and they became my safety. Apple responded to that, and I started shooting the lookbooks on the iPhone 17 Pro with just natural light; it felt really honest to me.” Last season saw the entire Dagger runway show filmed on iPhone, and this season went one step further with models taking selfies mid-runway walk or with AirPods Max slung around their necks.
Vans, meanwhile, approached Rainer early on, having seen him wear its shoes for years. After his first custom shoe became the talk of Dagger’s Paris showroom, the new SS27 collection featured models walking in slip-ons customized with metal stars, scribbled with marker, and given a round of distressing to perfect that lived-in look that defines the brand.
It's clear that Rainey has put in the work to elevate his craft, buoyed by the positive reception to last season’s debut runway show. “I realized I had to make a more elevated product [using] better fabrics and learning more about technique, which I've taken really seriously,” he says.
If the ecstatic crowd of Dagger-clad guests at this year’s show is anything to go by, the alt-version of home that Rainey has built, season by season, has seen its population boom beyond the core cast of characters he sends down his runway. The designer may be far from Portsrush, but Portsrush is never far from mind.
“This is where I draw all my inspiration from,” he tells us backstage. “It's weird because I didn’t have a romantic youth at all; it was actually the opposite. I guess this is how I'm healing, in a way: showing that experience as something beautiful and creative, rather than as it really was.”
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