I first met Dani at a gallery opening in South Kensington. He was wearing a long nautical jacket, calves bare, flowers in hand. A few weeks later I saw him again, this time in East London, in a yellow latex coat - calves, again, bare. I recall how the party asked for our Instagram names upon entry, how the drinks were served in paper cups that turned to mulch, and how Dani explained to me that he was working on an upcoming collection. I was enthralled - and saved - by the latter conversation.

A few months ago, Dani invited me to speak to him about his new collection. Later that weekend, we grab a bottle of corner shop wine and ascend to his airy Kentish town flat, where several of his designs are being stored. One is wrapped in cellophane, one is sitting by the recycling, another on top of the fridge, another in two halves on the shelves behind me.

It is a few weeks until Dani’s opening show – THE NARCISSIST – which has been over two years in the literal making, though many more in terms of the countless influences that had accumulated for him over time. ‘Everything in this collection is about me. Techniques I always wanted to try, ideas I wanted to realise. Inspiration that I want to process and express.’ Dani’s references are manifold, and from every corner of his life and creative maturation.

The very first dress of this collection stands at the end of the table, an expectant guest. It is a reminder, even as Dani pours our wine, that there is a show in the near distance. The dress is predominantly made from a metallic sheen fabric that was originally a background for portrait photos. ‘I used to work in a flower shop that had been a photography studio before. This fabric had been left behind, and I immediately fell in love, so I took it home and made it into a dress.’ He then introduced a striking bouquet of black, embroidered flowers bursting from the breast, transforming a garment that could have veered into ‘prom’ territory to a maximalist garment redolent of Valentino’s grittier cousin. ‘Imagine wearing this at a funeral,’ we joke. It is beautifully structured, animated, and emblematic of so much of the subsequent collection. Throughout his work, materials that usually reside in the background are brought to the foreground; the quotidian becomes a central focus and is reimagined with a fresh and playful – but never derivative – spin. Every reference has a home, every material has a use, if one only has the eye. Or rather, if one has Dani’s eye.

It is Dani’s eye for flowers that seems to inspire the show. ‘Flowers and plants are my complete obsession,’ he admits, gesturing to the countless flora surrounding us in the kitchen, the dried stems and grasses on the wall, and the fresh peonies in the vase. And there are orchids, orchids everywhere. Flowers are the rhythm of Dani’s collection, and motifs of the vase and the flower – the holder and the object – are refreshed and reimagined in varying moments.

Dani shows me was a ceramic breastplate, adorned with a beautifully detailed and painted ceramic bouquet. An unconventional, frankly inappropriate material to wear, the ceramic challenges our concept of clothing, while also fixing and preserving, with something of the botanist’s/museological/Victorian gaze, the otherwise-perishable flowers. The plate slots onto his shoulders perfectly. For a moment I convinced it is armour.

Flowers return in the next look: two vases tied to the torso, from which two fresh bouquets spring forth. Flowers, again, appear on a giant ceramic vase illustrated with cobalt paint – one of the most memorable in the collection owing to its mischievous proportions. The model just manages to peep above the neck, ludicrously conforming to the proportions of the vase’s body. At times, the body seems to the held and contained by the clothing. At others it seems to be making space for other type of holding, shelving, categorising – though the effect is never cluttered or overstuffed. ‘I see the body as a holder for what is going on,’ Dani reflects.

Dani’s horticultural obsession reaches its climax with the garment that has been residing in the bathroom. Removing the cellophane wrapper, Dani reveals another ceramic torso – this time populated with moss/orchids/plants. ‘It’s a living garment,’ he says, ‘so you have to keep it humid!’ In Dani’s world, a designer may as well be a gardener. Or is it the other way around? I am mesmerised by the confidence and ease with which he merges professions.

Many aspects of Dani’s collection involve a mischievous play of referencing, sparked by the things that he loves, and by those who love him. Dani’s childhood home in Seville seems to be another key influence in the collection. One top is made of dish cloths tightly packed then beautifully formed around the shoulders and arms and torso, a reimagination me of the interweaving daily textures and activities of dressing, washing, washing up. Another uses the gingham – ‘like the curtains in my childhood home’ – combined with the weaving patterns of a ratan chair, which Dani had been sitting in ‘my entire life.’

Dani does not just represent his upbringing in terms of the objects and materials that surrounded him, but also the people. ‘My grandmother used to embroider all the time and, when I was a young boy – seven, eight, maybe – she would entertain me by teaching me.’ Dani’s mother, similarly, would embroider and stitch. ‘As a kid in the south of Spain, it’s typical to have a cross-stitched frame with your name, that your mother picks out for you. I looked at mine every night, every morning.’ Dani applied and scaled-up this cross-stitching method to a jacket, adorned with poppies and daisies from his home village. He is also collaborating with his father, a baker, to make an outfit with bread. ‘I used to work with him in the bakery during the night, from 3am, then go to school in the day.’ Dani and his father had already completed test-runs of the look, which is going to be baked fresh for the day of the show. ‘I see bread as a material. Everything is material,’ he affirms.

Dani’s work is not just an act of remembering, but of reimagining. A vest adorned with ceramic mosaic (that same material again, but never quite in the same way) calls back to the kitchen tiles of southern Spain, and the pattern is of a still life table setting that is well-composed and impressively executed for a form as curvaceous as a torso. My favourite detail in the mosaic is the cigarette in the ashtray; I hope that archaeologists of the future dig it up and are both enamoured and perplexed by its prominence. ‘I am such a smoker,’ he admits.

Smoking comes back in another form. ‘My friend from Barcelona and I went on a walk to the Thames together. She told me a story about how Victorians smoked pipes form ceramic, which would then be thrown into the river.’ In the time since, those pipes had absorbed the metallic bleeds and mineral blemishes of the London sludge ever since. ‘The colours are crazy.’ After retrieving enough to cover an entire torso, Dani configured a garment of unique texture and tone – sedimentary layer of the city’s history. ‘Think of all the mouths that were touched by these. The conversations that were had, the gossip and the secrets,’ he teases. 

It’s a romantic idea. Dani – a boy originally from Seville – excavating the Thames for Victorian artefacts seemed emblematic of how his materials and techniques, like him, have travelled and evolved. Today, London and Seville are the two places that Dani calls home. ‘They are completely opposite to one another. I feel connected to both and I can’t choose. What one brings me, the other cannot. I’m a city dweller but I’m also such a village grandma!’ This dual existence is reflected in another dress that reimagines a traditional Spanish scarf in a metropolitan fashion. The traditional floral embroidery is completed with ribbons, which bring a luxurious and velvety feel to the covering. ‘It’s the same feeling, translated in a modern way.’

Floristry, photography, fashion, painting, embroidery, ceramics, baking, weaving, the urban, the rural – there are many rooms in Dani’s wheelhouse – though an interview is not a format that he is naturally drawn to. ‘I speak in riddles, and I can be hard to understand, even if I know exactly what I am saying.’ Despite this self-effacing gesture, Dani is concerted in his vision and does not falter in his reasoning. ‘Michealangelo talked about the final sculpture being trapped inside the marble, it was just a case of freeing it. Now I am not making David, but that is how I feel about my work. It always ends up fulfilling some sort of prophecy for itself.’ I ask if he likes the process of ‘carving’, so to speak. ‘No, it’s finishing I like best. I like seeing what I knew was in my head all along. It’s a relief.’

The finished pieces – which Dani in incidentally terms ‘wearable sculptures’ – are indeed beautiful. The degree of craft would not be out of place in a Loewe workshop. Though, of course, the practicality of wearing is a playful challenge in itself. A delicate glass brooch, made in collaboration with [artists]] from Barcelona, like the ceramic breast plate, is a material that is not typically worn, yet it insists on its function as apparel. The brooch is exquisitely blown, of flowers and water, as if a vase had just been emptied or thrown (vases are present in Dani’s work, even when off-stage, so to speak). ‘It’s like a frozen situation.’

An adjacent word to ‘frozen situation’ might be ‘scene’ – which we see in a full-length dress that displays a still life painting of flowers on the model’s body, the waist is a shelf, as if the torso were the gallery wall. ‘I love still life paintings,’ Dani reflects. ‘And I wanted a dress that could be a representation of them.’ I feel that he demonstrates a similar humility and commitment to daily objects and daily life – a comparison only strengthened by the Old Masters’ similar obsession with flowers and to vases. ‘Did you know that the same white tulip with red stripes appears in many of the Old Masters paintings? They were so expensive that the whole economy nearly crashed. That is just fascinating to me.’

I pointed out that the many still life masterpieces – while replete with lavish offerings – are also punctuated with bugs, rotting fruit, skulls. ‘There is something similar going on in my work,’ he responds. ‘It is made to be satisfying to look at, but there is always something a little off.’ Dani points to illustrations and embroideries of dead birds hidden in the collection, as well as a crack on the edge of a vase that happened during a professional firing. ‘Mistakes are vital. We are working with clay, which is a natural material, and when it behaves a certain way, I choose to respect that. It’s something to work with.’

Yet Dani is never deliberately messy or unthinking, and there is tight control and detailing through his entire collection. The models’ makeup is minimal, the hair pinned-back ‘as if they are just getting ready.’ The models all wear same cut of trousers and skirt – black, simple, elegant, also designed by Dani. ‘A uniform,’ he puts it.

The title, THE NARCISSIST should not be taken – unlike the myth – as a warning of the dangers of excessive self-obsession. For Dani, the word has shaken its more cautionary meaning. ‘I see the collection as a catalogue of all the situations and obsessions I have in mind, that I am now ready to share.’

In fact, THE NARCISSIST, cleverly gets the problem self-obsession out of the way with this naming gesture. We are a self-obsessed generation, so to describe any artistic showcase – be it an album, a book, a collection – as ‘deeply personal’ (even if it is) is often too obvious and easy a claim to make. It can push artists into a cul-de-sac where the only explanation for their work is biographical. Yet Dani’s show escapes such a retreat, by transforming the ‘situations and obsessions’ of an individual into a sequence that is beautiful, fascinating, intelligent, and celebratory of the people and processes that surround him. He finds ways to identify, craft, edit, and frame his obsessions, making them tangible, wearable.

Sitting in the pavement of this critical cul-de-sac, I have decided I want to recline on – or rather in – Dani’s sofa dress. With a silhouette that could be seen on a Balenciaga runway, but with the subtly executed detailing of haberdashery studs, and a character of delightful heaviness (without frumpiness), the sofa dress is camp, perfectly constructed, at once domestic and high fashion.

I ask the narcissist what happens next. He replies: ‘It’s not about me anymore, it’s me showing you what I did. You can take whatever you want from that.’