A room built in 1903 for looking at objects, and the objects Daniel Del Valle put in it

ART & CULTURE · LONDON

Reading time: 10 min

Ladbroke Hall held its first catwalk show in February, and the interesting thing is not that fashion arrived. It is that the designer says his pieces are sculptures rather than garments, and the room he showed them in was built to display objects for inspection. A ceramic shirt made from the bed of the Thames, in a hall built for looking at cars.

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On 21 February 2026, Ladbroke Hall in west London staged its first catwalk show, presenting Daniel Del Valle and his debut collection, The Narcissist, as part of the official London Fashion Week programme.

The temptation is to file that as a venue widening its remit. A cultural building adds fashion to a programme that already runs to art, collectible design, dance, food and jazz.

That reading misses the better story, which is a room.

The show took place in the Sunbeam Theatre, the most architecturally significant space in the building. It is one of the original display halls of a 1903 car factory, built so that people could walk around an automobile and look at it closely, in daylight, from every side.

Del Valle, for his part, is unusually direct about what he made. “I know it’s a fashion collection, but I consider the pieces as sculptures, not garments,” he has said of the work.

So a designer who makes objects showed them in a hall designed for the inspection of objects. The building did not stretch to accommodate fashion. Fashion turned up in the one form the building was already built to handle.

The room was designed for exactly this

Start with the architecture, because it is doing more work here than anyone credited at the time.

Ladbroke Hall was built in 1903 and 1904 as the office and showroom block of the Clément-Talbot motor works, a venture founded by Charles Chetwynd-Talbot, the 20th Earl of Shrewsbury, in partnership with the French manufacturer Adolphe Clément. Construction was supervised by Charles Garrard. The building was listed Grade II in February 1989.

The listing description is worth reading closely, because it explains the plan. The building is singled out for its architectural quality and, specifically, for its lavish display halls, made for inspecting vehicles and components.

That is a very particular kind of room. A showroom for early motor cars had to solve a set of problems that a shop does not. The object is large, it is expensive, it is bought slowly, and the buyer walks around it. So the room needs a long clear span, generous height, even daylight and no columns in the middle of the floor.

The exterior tells you what the company thought of itself. Red brick with stone dressings, a gabled tile roof with a gambrel roof over the central bay, a twenty-window range, gabled dormers flanked by urn finials. The central entrance carries paired Doric pilasters and a dentilled entablature beneath scrolled brackets, supporting a broken segmental pediment, with a porte-cochère on Doric columns and decorative wrought iron. Above the doorway sits a large semi-circular arched window in a moulded stone architrave.

None of that is factory language. It is Edwardian Baroque doing an impression of a country house, which is precisely what a company selling motor cars to the aristocracy would want.

And inside, the Sunbeam Theatre still carries the original 1903 crest, a decorative roundel in Art Nouveau style, a wreath with two figures flanking the company insignia.

The room now takes 300 standing or 190 seated and has retained its daylight. It is used for talks, performance and dinners.

The pieces are objects, and the designer says so first

Del Valle is a 2026 LVMH Prize semi-finalist, and The Narcissist took three years to make. That is not a fashion timeline. It is a studio timeline.

Look at what the pieces are made of.

A ceramic T-shirt built from thousands of Victorian clay pipes recovered from the River Thames. A bodice constructed from small porcelain pots and vases, corseted at the back and sides with silk ribbons. A living bodice that has to be watered daily, extending a long-running preoccupation with orchids. Wax embellishments added to his mother’s wedding dress. A sculptural garment made from bread, in this case pain de mie loaves, developed with his father.

Elsewhere in the collection there are three urn-shaped silhouettes: one in ceramic with blue and white floral decoration, one covered in snail shells, and one built on a wooden crinoline structure with small vases set into it. One dress arrived with its own table.

Around seven looks in total. Flowers were strapped to the models’ heels so that they appeared to grow out of the foot.

Consider what that list has in common. Ceramic, porcelain, wax, wood, bread, shell, living plant. Every one of those is a material with a maker’s tradition behind it, and not one of them is a textile. This is a collection assembled out of the vocabulary of the decorative arts.

Which is why the fashion framing undersells it. Judged as clothing, a porcelain bodice is impractical and a bread garment is absurd. Judged as objects, they are precise: each one takes a domestic craft and scales it up until it has to be carried by a person.

A shirt made from the bed of the river

The clay pipe shirt deserves its own paragraph, because it is the strongest single idea in the collection and it is a London idea.

Clay pipes are the most commonly found object on the Thames foreshore. They were the disposable item of their day, made cheaply, smoked, and thrown into the river in enormous numbers across the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Anyone who has walked the foreshore at low tide has seen the white stems lying in the gravel. They are so ordinary that most people step over them.

Del Valle collected them and fired them into a garment.

That is ornament taken out of the city rather than off a shelf, and it is the same move that separates a good heritage interior from a generic one. Choosing a period pattern from a reference book gives you something accurate and anonymous. Deriving the material from the specific place gives you something that could only have been made here.

A shirt made of Thames clay pipes cannot be made in Milan or Antwerp. It is site-specific in the way a commissioned artwork is site-specific, and it was shown two miles from the river it came out of.

It is worth reading alongside the custom rug at 8½ London that traces the line of the buried River Walbrook beneath Skinners’ Hall. Two designers in the same city, in the same season, both reaching under London for their material.

Three crafts, three people

The other seam running through the work is inheritance, and it is unusually specific.

Del Valle grew up in Pilas, a small town in the province of Seville. He learned embroidery from his grandmother, ceramics from his mother and baking from his father.

Those are not decorative biographical notes. They map directly onto the collection. The needlework is the grandmother. The porcelain vessels are the mother. The bread garment, made with his father, is the father, and the wedding dress in wax is his mother’s actual dress.

A collection where each principal material corresponds to a person who taught him to use it is a rare thing, and it is the part of the work most likely to last. Del Valle trained as a florist, and floristry is the discipline that binds the rest: it is the craft of arranging living material into a composition that will change and eventually fail.

He describes the world he has built as The VXLLEY, a garden. “The VXLLEY is the name of my garden, and everything that grows inside it is a reflection of me,” he has said. “When people come to see the collection, I don’t want them to expect to learn anything deep. I just want them to feel like they’re walking through a garden, surrounded by life.”

That is a modest description of a very deliberate structure. A garden is the one composition that is designed to keep changing. Nothing in it holds still, and the design has to account for that.

The building already deals in objects that do a job

The reason this show sits so comfortably in this building is commercial as well as architectural.

Ladbroke Hall was acquired in 2019 by Loïc Le Gaillard and Julien Lombrail, founders of Carpenters Workshop Gallery, and the 43,000 square foot building is now the gallery’s London home alongside its spaces in Paris, New York and Los Angeles.

Carpenters Workshop deals in functional art: pieces that are sculpture first and furniture second, made by artists rather than by manufacturers. A Nacho Carbonell light is a light, and it is also a sculpture that is difficult to live with in the best sense.

A porcelain bodice is that proposition applied to the body. It has a function, that function is compromised by the ambition of the object, and the compromise is the point.

The restoration, led by David Adjaye, kept that logic in the fabric of the building itself, with permanent contributions commissioned from the gallery’s own artists rather than specified from catalogues.

Vincenzo De Cotiis designed the restaurant, now home to Pollini, led by chef Emanuele Pollini, with a site-specific work by Sir Christopher Le Brun. Michèle Lamy and Rick Owens made Lamyland, the patron bar and lounge. Ingrid Donat designed a private room and Robert Stadler a terrace. Nicolas Schuybroek designed the subterranean gallery and wine cellar. Luciano Giubbilei landscaped the 12,500 square foot garden, with its bamboo.

Read that list as a plan rather than a credit roll and something becomes clear. Almost every room in this building was made by somebody who makes objects. An interior assembled that way is not decorated, it is collected. Which is why a collection of objects walked through it without any friction at all.

What breaks tells you what something is

Two things came apart during the show. A ceramic piece shattered backstage moments before it was due out, and a glass orb fell during the final walk and broke at the backstage entrance.

Reviewers treated both as part of the evening, and they were right to.

Clothes do not shatter. The failure mode of a garment is a split seam. The failure mode of a ceramic object is a break, and the fact that these pieces failed like ceramics rather than like clothing is the clearest possible evidence of what they are.

The same is true of the bodice that has to be watered. A garment that dies if you neglect it for a week is not really a garment, it is a planted thing that has been trained onto a body. Building maintenance into the piece is a decision, and it is the boldest one here, because it means the work cannot be archived in a box.

There is a long tradition of this in contemporary craft: material chosen precisely because it will not behave, so that the object stays alive and slightly at risk. Set that against a room whose original job was to present machined metal for close inspection, and the contrast does real work.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The easy version of this is a venue story: cultural building adds fashion, programme expands, everybody wins.

The better version is that nothing expanded.

A hall built in 1903 to display objects for close inspection was used, one hundred and twenty three years later, to display objects for close inspection. The objects had people inside them, which is new. The room’s job did not change.

That is the argument for putting this on a design site rather than a fashion one. Del Valle is not making clothes that reference craft. He is making ceramics, wax work, joinery and baking, at the scale of a person, out of skills three members of his family taught him, in a building where almost every room was made by somebody who makes objects.

The shirt of river clay is the piece to remember. Thousands of discarded pipes, pulled out of the mud of a city, fired into something that has to be carried rather than worn.

Take the material out of the place and the object can only have come from there. It is the same principle that makes a good building, and it turns out to work on a body.