Duckie Brown (Q2966)
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Duckie Brown is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Duckie Brown |
Duckie Brown is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Consider the circle. A symbol of the divine. The beginning and the end. Infinity. Duckie Brown’s Steven Cox was thinking about the circle. “[This season] I thought, let’s simplify this: circle, square, T-shirt, jeans,” he explained at the Duckie Brown studio. He put a bolt of Japanese denim on the floor, unrolled it and drew a giant circle around him, like Jackson Pollock doing one of his action paintings. “Then I realized I could’ve just put a pin on it and just gone around it, but I was an idiot and I just did a freehand circle and it was beautiful.” That circle became the pair of jeans that opened the spring collection, their curves sprouting out of the body, worn with a very classic, very fitted, matching jacket. He spread the trousers—all four feet wide of them—on the floor. “There’s something a little bit Maria Cornejo about it,” he added, looking down at them. “I love her. I’ve known her for years, and there’s something about her in there.”On the subway, Cox and Daniel Silver saw a skateboarder kid wearing the classic skateboarder outfit of short sleeve T-shirt layered over long sleeve T-shirt. “How fabulous is that?” thought Cox. The T-shirts the kid was wearing were likely not fabulous, but the sheer Duckie versions that came out of the sighting certainly were; a boxy white chiffon tee screen printed with DUCKIE BROWN in big block letters, worn over a long sleeve yellow chiffon tee. Their simplicity engendered a certain kind of urgent desire—of courseyou need the Duckie Brown chiffon logo tee. The classic Duckie Brown suit also got a makeover, in pink chiffon.To contrast the down-to-earth beginnings of the collection, they brought in myriad exquisitely embellished fabrics—pink ostrich feathers on a long open-front jacket, gray ostrich feathers on an easy pullover shape, a sweater hand-beaded in a monochrome pattern, all-over silver sequined trousers, a white lace guipure poet-ish blouse and a matching apron dress. The Duckies have never shied away from drama, but there was a real larger-than-life zest running throughout this collection; a sense of wearing beautiful clothes just because you can and you want to and not because the occasion calls for it. To wit; they reproduced a top coat that used to belong to Cox’s “Grandpa Bill” in simple black organza, with no buttons, no padding, and as few seams as possible. It was light as air and elegant and yet also somehow, subversive.
But so was the “finale” piece, a sculptural, ruffled jacket-cape Cox constructed by hand in the studio. “I asked our pattern maker to cut me the pieces of a double breasted jacket—I think I just wanted to do something on the stand,” he recalled. The “ruffles” were in fact pattern pieces, more or less positioned where they would go if you were actually constructing a jacket, but not actually sewn closed; instead they were left raw and hand-stitched in tiny little bows. “I think it was an art project, but it’s also a progression,” said Cox. “I don’t know whether this is going to inform the next collection, or where I’m heading, but there’s some structure, I suppose.” An end and a beginning.
27 September 2024
There was no overarching inspiration at Daniel Silver and Steven Cox’s Duckie Brown this season. The collection is a reflection of Cox’s pure, undiluted sense of color and shape. On the walls inside their West Village studio, loose leaf papers were taped to the wall, each one bearing an abstract expressionist croquis, some more immediately recognizable as clothes than others. A gold shape with a slight drape sat atop a black rectangle with a rounded top; while a bold magenta long sleeve jacket floated between two draped gold shapes above and below, anchored by another magenta rectangle.“I think the thing that’s most important is this,” Cox said. “I don’t think I have done anything that is so close [to the sketches]. I mean, it’s almost like a mirror.” His croquis have no bodies—there are no heads, no arms, no legs, nothing. It makes sense. Duckie Brown may be a “menswear brand” by trade, but the clothes are for whoever wants to wear them. (On the mini-moodboard this season were images of Kristen Stewart and Jarvis Cocker, both wearing suits.)The suit remains the foundation from which the Duckie Brown universe emerges, it’s just that everything about it is available for experimentation. A tailored two-button jacket worn with extra-wide, all-around pleated trousers in beige glen plaid Japanese cotton is super light and yet has the ability to hold shape and volume—almost like a ballgown skirt. A tuxedo shirt is made entirely from the piqué fabric traditionally used on just the “bib” part, and has 16 (functional) shiny gold buttons down the front furthering the maximalist vision. And an oversized button-down shirt and high waisted wide-legged trousers in sparkly gold lurex has already found a home with a customer in Chicago.“I think there is something in here that is a fantasy,” added Cox. An outlier statement in a season where other designers have been talking about creating everyday clothes for their customers. The difference, of course, is that Cox and Silver know exactly who their customers are; they personally greet them in their studio, they answer their DMs on Instagram. So when they speak of fantasies, they know exactly which ones they are fulfilling.
8 March 2024
You don’t need to read this review to realize that the mood Duckie Brown’s Steven Cox and Daniel Silver were feeling for spring was simply “JOYOUS!”“The exuberance, the happiness, the joy of being in Greece [this past summer], the way that we can do it,” Cox explained, pointing to the first image in their lookbook where he’s modeling a backless silk sheer T-shirt with a painterly floral in bold swaths of fuchsia and teal, paired with backless trousers in semi-sheer silk and a tightly-grouped floral print in shades of mustard yellow and green. His body is creating an X shape, and around his arms is a piece that could best be described as the absence of a button down shirt—just the collar and the sleeves in a Champagne sort of shade of beige and black polka dots. Everything is somewhat, somehow attached to his body and yet it also remains free from it, flying around him, caught mid-motion. “We’ve got no restraints, we’ve got no bosses, we’ve got no one to answer to, we’re not on the wheel anymore,” he said.It’s not that their collections are generally serious or somber, but there was a particular sense of letting go and coloring outside the lines for spring. Many of the pieces were backless. Cox had been looking at a multi-pocketed apron-style shirt from an early Duckie collection: “I put this on and I was like, ‘Why do I need to tie this around? Why can’t I just let it hang? How can I have nothing on while also having loads of clothes on?'” The resulting pieces were more multi-functional than their description alone might suggest. The backless tees have sleeves that you can add on and Japanese grosgrain ribbon to tie in the back so that they’re able to be worn as a regular tee; there was a softly tailored double-breasted jacket with long sleeves and no back, but extra long ribbons that can be tied around the waist or whatever other part of the body the wearer fancies. They looked just as fantastic simply draped around the neck like a necklace or fully worn with arms in arm holes as god(?) intended. The backless pants were indeed more of an accessory, like an asymmetric fabric belt: they have a waistband and flat pant legs, like they’re made for a paper doll. (At the studio the proposition of pairing a canvas khaki version over the oversized classic khaki trousers came up and it was punk and fun, though in the lookbook Cox is naturally wearing them with nothing underneath.
)But what about clothes with fronts and backs and sides? There were plenty of those, and they were every bit as exuberant. One thing about Cox and Silver is that they know how to make C-L-O-T-H-E-S. There were wide-leg giraffe-print trousers (“Giraffe!”), easy and very elegant oversized tank dresses with a bit of a train in silk florals or classic black. Although they love their extra-wide silhouettes, this season there was a new, fitted button down shirt in subtle striped blue and white cotton with the sleeves cut a little bit short—“Maybe because of all the bracelets and jewelry I wear now,” mused Cox—and the collar a bit pointier and longer than normal, which they paired with matching trousers, “like pajamas.” In an effort to ground all the ethereal florals, there were proper trousers and jackets in brightly colored yellow and orange canvas, a soft Japanese jacquard with a subtle floral print that was like denim meets summer tailoring, and then real sturdy railroad stripe denim in a heavier and a more lightweight fabric. Silver already had one of the jackets at home. “I never make myself something, but…” he said. The tension between a very femme flamboyance against the more “butch” workwear-ready silhouettes was more evident this season. “Steven's like, ‘But how are we going to explain it?’” Silver said in the middle of the appointment, when they switched from one fabric story to the other, before adding, “And I’m like, ‘Because that’s who we are.’”
3 October 2023
The attached scarf on the black coat in slide 2 of this lookbook unwinds to a good 20 feet. Duckie Brown’s Steven Cox dreamed it up as a sort of obi, cinched tight around the waist, and it requires a partner to do it up properly.That’s the kind of extravagance that might not fly in a department store. And online? Pfft. Cox and his partner Daniel Silver walked away from that kind of business model pre-pandemic. These days, they sell their collections by appointment in their West Village studio, and they know their customers on a first-name basis. To say that the formula has freed them up is to suggest that their designs were once traditional, which they weren’t. Still, there’s an amped-up sense of play here that’s pretty irresistible.Beyond that prodigious scarf, you can see it in a backless waistcoat that drapes to a deep-v in front and a silk tank (top is the wrong word) that drapes even more extravagantly—all the way down to the shins. The concept of gender lines has been erased from their design process. If the flash of bare back provided by that waistcoat and by a similarly cut apron top raise an eyebrow, it’s useful to remember where the conversation around skirts for men was five or 10 years ago—i.e. nowhere. Now, wrap skirts of the sort in this collection have become more or less normalized, though nowhere else are you going to see the grosgrain ribbon waistbands that decorate the Duckie Brown versions.Cox and Silver don’t just have an eye for cut and silhouette, they’ve also got a flair for fabrics and color. Their XXL and 8XL button-downs are cut from silk crepe they put through the washing machine—and the dryer!—for a slightly rumpled, lived-in look. They did the same with a ’50s-cut short-sleeve shirt in weightless pink silk that they showed with cross-over waistband silk trousers in a pretty shade of lilac.Those lilac pants didn’t make the lookbook, but there’s a video of Cox modeling them up on the Duckie Brown Instagram account. The only thing better than a scroll through their social feed, is a face-to-face session in their studio.
20 March 2023
For a few seasons now, Duckie Brown’s Steven Cox and Daniel Silver have been selling their collection exclusively by appointment from their studio in the West Village. The prospect of “By Appointment Only” may have once been a symbol of gatekeeping and exclusivity, but here it’s more akin to being welcomed into someone’s house for a home-cooked meal (indeed their studio used to be their apartment before they decamped to Brooklyn). Further distancing their modus operandi from a stuffy luxury environment are the videos they post on their Instagram account, where Cox tries on clothes while he and Silver chat about the fits and the colors or whatever else comes to mind. They invite viewers to DM them to ask questions or make an appointment to see the clothes in person.Do not be fooled by their irreverent attitude, however, the clothes they make are serious in their approach to cut, fit, and fabric, even when the result is a pair of teeny running shorts in French lace (or silk, or a delightfully sheer cotton voile), or a “high waisted tight” that can be pulled all the way above your head, as seen in the first look of the collection. The first few looks, in fact, are variations on a body-conscious sporty silhouette all in black: a maxi-length t-shirt, a little tank, leggings, long tubes of fabric that can be used as arm warmers or leg warmers, a perfectly boxy swim brief.The Duckies do not believe in lofty inspirations. They have been doing this for over 20 years and their inspiration is simply… themselves. “Twice a week we do Gyrotronics with a German ballet dancer who’s very strict called Wilma,” Cox explained. He shows me a picture of himself laying on a mat in a pilates pose, then a simplified drawing of lines made with a thick black marker that is in fact a sketch for the spandex pieces. “We worked with Daniel Storto — I’ve known him since I was 19 — and he’s a glove designer that lives up in Gloversville, where all the gloves used to be made. He fashioned all those pieces, he’s an amazing talent,” Cox said.A pink silk organza bomber jacket worn with wide-leg, bright fuschia trousers had its roots on a version they’d made in raw denim years ago that he’d recently come across while rummaging through his closet. (“I don’t know where this comes from, but I needed a pink flower at the end [of the collection],” Cox said.
) He was also excited to note he randomly found pale pink snaps at a store in midtown that perfectly matched the jacket and didn’t have to special-order them.
7 October 2022
Days before the Duckie Brown dudes were preparing to show their fall 2022 collection, the brand’s Instagram was hacked. That was Steven Cox and Daniel Silver’s direct line to their customers—where they sold not only their products but their story. To solve the issue, they started a new account from scratch, @duckiebrownduckiebrown. The Instagram fiasco wouldn’t be of much note except that their fall 2022 collection is one of their Duckiest Browns yet—with twice the punch of their usual shapes and colors. “It’s the guts of Duckie Brown,” Cox said over Zoom.The voluminous, oversize shirting that has garnered them many fans of late continues here in bubblegum pink and citron. Tiny gym shorts reappear as well, all the better to show off those gams you’ve been honing swimming in the Aegean sea! The most ingenious creation might be an overcoat with the shoulders pulled forward that was inspired by the way a dog’s coat is cut, with armholes projecting straight out of the chest. “We went to storage and pulled out our favorites,” said Cox.So many of those favorites were tailored originally by Rocco Ciccarelli, the famed New York tailor who helped the Duckies get started and also created the basic shapes at Thom Browne. The essentials they established together, casually sharp tailoring, coats in the most beautiful fabric—“the same fabric they use at Buckingham Palace,” says Silver—are paired with the dudes’ own classics: aprons, short shorts, drop-crotch pants, big shirts, and sweatshirts with contrasting front panels. It’s not new-new, but it is both important and patently gorgeous. Duckie Brown is one of the last remaining brands doing it New York style—hardcore fashion with a sentimental edge. Let’s hope they get their Instagram account back, if for nothing but the sheer fact that a new generation needs to learn more about these masterful tailors.
17 March 2022
I’m told that as you age, gravity does its job and things once pert begin to melt downward toward the ground. Luckily, this has not happened to the derriere of Duckie Brown’s Steven Cox—his bum, pert as ever, makes an encore appearance in his spring 2022 collection’s look book, clothed in tiny tap shorts inspired by a pair his trainer once gifted him. (Kudos to the trainer.)But after 20 years doing Duckie, Cox and his partner, Daniel Silver, have let gravity work in other ways. This season they have taken all their hems and dropped them to the floor, turning button-down silk shirts and nylon taffeta tote bags into soigné gowns and body-size bags. The effect is rhapsodic; Cox models the slate shirtdresses and front-to-back flannel shirts with the casual, in media res candor of a stage actor. A jersey raglan sweatshirt in a muddy taupe hangs extra long like an uncanny cross between a nightshirt and a red carpet gown. A scrunch-waist taffeta skirt is cut like a gigantic rectangle; tiny miniskirt aprons in chiffon and wool counter the strict, serious forms of classic tailored coats and puddling-hem trousers. The collection is at once exuberant in its monolithic silhouettes and monastic; you would need a big personality (and possibly a great ass) to pull these clothes off.Cox and Silver have both, of course, and one imagines their clients do too. Since stepping away from the wholesale system and launching Duckie Brown as a direct-to-customer enterprise—and I meandirect; clients must visit or FaceTime in to their West Village studio to shop—the pair have been able to connect more intimately with the psychology of their shoppers. As they go through their rails, they know exactly who might want what, in what color, and for what occasion. This is why, season to season, the Duckies don’t have to change too much. For this 20th anniversary show of force, they’ve repurposed many of their great ideas and fabrics from the past, modernizing them into genderless, sensual tunics and skirts. More of their 20-year strokes of genius will be collected in a book, out soon; one can only hope it’s accompanied by a party full of fans decked out in Duckie, celebrating two of New York’s great masters of cut, color, and (I’d venture) calisthenics.
30 September 2021
Gender-queering, contrary to some current thinking, is not a Gen-Z phenomenon. On the fashion front, Duckie Brown’s Steven Cox and Daniel Silver have been at it for almost 20 years. “We say we make women’s clothes for men,” Silver explained on a Zoom call. The non-binary style of Duckie’s collections has become only more apparent since they left the runway and the wholesale system five years ago. Selling their collections by private appointment from their West Village studio has allowed them to indulge not just their own most irreverent, category-blurring impulses, but those of their clients as well.Case in point this season is a sculptural top whose couture-ish roundness is made possible by a stiff fabric,papirok, more often used in bag construction. Cox described the shirt’s vibe as “a cross between a robot and Dua Lipa.” Or consider an organza top, a glorified T-shirt really, that they call the bridal chemise. “It’s sort of a man’s version of the negligee you wear on your wedding night that Dua Lipa and I could both wear,” Cox elaborated. No wonder their customers keep coming back for private appointments—the Duckies give good chat.Boiling it down, Cox described the new collection as an assortment of T-shirts and shorts for the time of year when he wants to wear as little as possible, on Mykonos preferably. But of course these basics are anything but conventional; the tops are mostly sheer and the bottoms are exceedingly skimpy. Cox likes a short that’s somewhere between a 1980s runners’ style and a silk tap pant. You’ve heard of side boob; well, may we introduce you to side cheek? As a culture, we are all too familiar with naked female bodies, but this kind of exposure on a male feels new, almost taboo. Cox, who posed for the photos in the look book, wondered aloud, “Can I get my bum inVogue?”There are other pieces here, including a ballgown sweatshirt with pleats at the neckline and super-high-waist pants with the pleats coming out of the pockets, not the waistband, that are less provocative, but could never be mistaken for conservative—or conventional.
21 March 2021
Steven Cox and Daniel Silver spent their lockdown making “how to wear it” videos for their Instagram account. Cox modeled and Silver manned the camera, both of them did the pitching, and they report that business went very well. If the pandemic made producing their new collection more difficult than it otherwise would’ve been, it did bring about a new way of engaging with customers. One of the lessons of 2020 is the necessity of the feedback loop. Designers that make fashion for fashion’s sake and not for living-and-breathing clients, aren’t likely to make it out of the COVID recession.That’s not to say that what Cox and Silver do isn’t fashion. Quite the contrary; conservative dressers aren’t likely to stumble across @officialduckiebrown, and the quarantine didn’t do anything to tamp down the designers’ idiosyncratic instincts. Consider the ruffled collar of Look Four, which is almost Elizabethan in its proportions. It can also be worn untied and askew for a more “Donna Karan cold shoulder” vibe, à la Look Three.A lot of pushing against the masculine/feminine boundary was happening here: with the rounded, rather than straight line patterns, with the preponderance of washed silk. In the heat of summer, that delicate material puts women at a distinct advantage over men who are stuck in heavier suiting fabrics. The soft, almost voluptuous silhouettes of Duckie’s oversized shirts and pants are bigger sartorial risks, but with matching pay-offs. Cox models again here with dapper eccentricity.Cox and Silver pulled some old tailoring out of their storage facility and will sell it alongside their new designs. Dries Van Noten is doing something similar with archive items in his new Los Angeles store. That’s another pandemic-time innovation that should stick around permanently.
12 October 2020
The sorry state of the official New York’s men’s schedule notwithstanding, the action in fashion in 2020 is in menswear. Watching the recently wrapped shows in London, Milan, and Paris is to witness the explosion of the old rules. There were strass brooches at Kim Jones’s Dior Men and David Bowie–by-way-of–Kansai Yamamoto one-legged jumpsuits at Rick Owens. It’s out with the stuffy and old, and in with the experimental, the gender-liquid, and the new.Duckie Brown’s Steven Cox and Daniel Silver are riding that wavelength for fall. Consider the back-to-front button-down in see-through chiffon Cox models in Look 4. Or the black shorts of Look 12; those extravagant swaths of fabric Cox clutches in his hands tie together to produce a particularly exuberant bow. As he so lovingly put it, the duo’s fabric choices this season lean, “a little grandma.” The delicate painted floral of a silk pajama set is particularly pretty, but the pink silk jacquards they counterintuitively used for their tailoring were also quite dandy.Most of the fabrics they’re using these days are pulled from their own stockpiles. That’s another way they’re sensing the times: reducing, reusing, and recycling. Silver also recently surfaced a large quantity of the leather gloves he made in the 1980s to sell at the salon nights they host in their showroom-gallery. The red leather pair hand-painted with black spots would look fetching on the woman who buys their double-breasted black silk jacquard jacket with the shrunken waistcoat over it.
5 February 2020
In the past week, we’ve witnessed the great American department store Barneys be sold and the New York original Zac Posen shutter his eponymous business. “It’s not an easy time in our industry,” Posen told Vogue Runway. It’s true, the old systems seem to be coming apart at the seams, but it’s not all dire headlines: New models are emerging.Consider Steven Cox and Daniel Silver of Duckie Brown; their last runway show was in 2016. In the interim they unwound their wholesale relationships and converted their Meatpacking District studio into a salon of sorts, one part appointment-only store and the other part gallery, where they host private clients and events that split the difference between art openings and pop-up markets. A visit to their charming, well-curated space is as energizing as a trip through a big-box store is depleting.The smaller-is-better approach feels right for all the familiar reasons: the winnowing of established names from Fashion Week, the glut of stuff not only in our closets but also in our landfills, and consumers’ growing distaste for giant corporations (see: the tech backlash) among them. It’s right for Cox and Silver in particular because they’re making non-flashy but still special wardrobing pieces designed for real life, not the runway, like trenches, crombies, drop-crotch pants, and drop-sleeve button-downs, plus the occasional one-off triathlon short in a kitschy silk print. If you want a fall piece or even an archival Duckie look in a fabric from the giant stack of rolls under their work table, they can make that for you for a surcharge. Conveniently for all involved, since there’s no longer a “middle man,” they’re able to charge less and still earn more than they did pre-restructure.On their spring 2020 racks are a pair of trenches: one is an almost weightless buff-colored silk and the other in a bright yellow stiff-waxed cotton, identically cut yet entirely different in affect. Ingenuity through practicality; it’s a simple recipe for complicated times, and it’s working for Duckie Brown.
6 November 2019
Last season, Duckie Brown’s Steven Cox and Daniel Silver moved their label into experimental, creation-and-curation territory. It’s working. At the pair’s Meatpacking District space they sell newly made Duckie Brown pieces alongside vintage ones (and there are non-Duckie Brown vintage finds in the mix, too). There’s art, on rotation (currently sculpture by Ohad Meromi, including retro-kitsch palm tree lamps). There’s a cutting room table filled with Speedo swimsuits that are pinned with confetti scraps of fabric. Essentially, the idea feels like a very glossy tag sale.That being said, Cox and Silver do work on a new collection each season—it just finds itself distilled into their blend, which is a refreshing thing to observe. Call it a slower-than-slow-roll approach; they’re not violating the rules, they’re just working entirely on their own terms. The reason, Cox says, “is because we love doing it this way. That’s it.” He also mentions that, even though the lookbook is photographed with a female model, he still considers Duckie Brown a menswear line. “I am not a womenswear designer. I’m useless at womenswear. But, I think we have a bigger female customer base at the moment.” These two have never really followed convention, and Cox’s logic, therein, makes sense.The story for the new collection, if it can be extricated from the jumble, is jersey—particularly the use of jersey on outerwear, like Crombie coats, peacoats, Harrington coats, and aviator jackets. Some examples were heavier, some were more liquid in patina. One highlight, the Crombie, was featherlight. “Is it a T-shirt or a coat?” Cox asked. “Because it’s kind of a T-shirt.” Precedent would have it called a coat, but again, they’re operating outside of the standard here. Another takeaway was a one-of-a-kind reworked bomber jacket, inset with a lapis-hue, sequin-embroidered halter off of an old Oscar de la Renta dress. As for their best-selling elongated silk shirt, its new iteration for Spring features skinny, simple referee stripes.
11 October 2018
It has been two years since a Duckie Brown collection appeared on Vogue Runway. In that interim, the label’s heads, Steven Cox and Daniel Silver—“the Duckies,” as they call themselves—were thinking about opening their own store. But, exasperated by New York’s ultra-high costs for ultra-low square footage, they looked inward. They are now set to open a by-appointment-only boutique service in their studio on West 13th Street. Recharged by the idea, they’ve designed a new collection—but don’t call it Fall. According to Silver, the pieces will just keep “rolling out.”To outline a visual of their range and their non-adherence to seasonal bracketing or, really, rules in general, Cox held up a tweed coat: “This is me in winter.” Then he lifted a pair of wispy, hardly there, leave-little-to-the-imagination short shorts: “This is me, gardening in Mykonos.” Silver noted, “We’ve done a collection for people. All people. Every category on Tinder.” (This also implied that, in some cases, prices will be lower, as the wholesale element is no longer in the picture.)The clothes did have a nonbinary appeal and were, in places, buttressed by what Duckie Brown has come to be known for over its 16 or so years in the business: loosened and long shirting (especially in lightweight flannels), great jackets, and humorous-slash-offbeat tees.The studio-store will also feature rarer vintage Duckie Brown pieces; “kettles from Ghana”; “pareos from Spain”; a slew of other curated goods and art; a built-in personalization service; and, promisingly, social gatherings as Cox and Silver see fit. “So many people do one thing, but you might not know what their other talents are,” said Cox. “There are secrets. You’re a journalist, but you may also be really good at knitting; I don’t know. You could come here and knit for us.” Concluded Silver: “We can finally control the world we want to show. And who better to sell Duckie Brown than the Duckies?”
12 February 2018
“Can you wear a puffer jacket under a suit? Do you have to show 84 looks?”Steven Cox was asking the important questions today at the—frankly awesome—six-look presentation forDuckie Brown, the menswear label he runs with partner Daniel Silver that has consistently been a gender-dissolving example of advanced New York fashion. “We just wanted an edited show,” added Silver with sly and knowing exasperation. The crowd was momentarily confused when the duo emerged from backstage after the sextet of models took their lap, but the gamble paid off. The micro-collection’s title, Just a Little Duckie, suddenly made all the right kind of twisted sense.“It’s real menswear,” said Cox. “We’ve done womenswear for men for so long, and it’s now happening for men in the mainstream, so it was time to go back.” In the pair’s singular style, these clothes still looked desirably fresh and unexpected. Suiting was the main theme in a loose way, with an élan of awareness and experimentation, but not overextension. A “dead-straight” blazer, styled unbuttoned as though to almost look A-line in cut, was excellent; likewise a depuffed puffer jacket, done in shirting material.The success in differentiation, in making it Duckie, came from what Silver said were the “little bit off” proportions, like high and tabbed collars; “almost puddle”–hemmed pants; and lengthened sleeves. As the thoughtful “Your Silent Face” by New Order trailed off on the speakers postshow, Silver wrapped it up: “It’s that moment. You always need to have another image and another beat to keep it interesting.” Less is more, in this case, really meant something.
2 February 2016
How do you get from "jeans and a T-shirt" to nipple-baring organza tops and gigantic pants with paper-bag-waist pants trailing ribbons? The minds of Duckie Brown's Steven Cox and Daniel Silver work in mysterious ways. Yes, they started out with the sturdiest of building blocks of the American male wardrobe this season, but where they wound up was far, far away. It wasn't androgynous, the predominant meme of the Spring '16 men's shows so far, as much as it was ambiguous. The color story played into that—salmon pink with denim blue, lilac and navy, the electric yellow of an oversized suit. The textures had a role too. Has a men's label on this side of the Atlantic ever used so much silk charmeuse? But mostly it was in the details: the piecrust frills of the size 48 pants cinched to fit young men with delicate, size 28 waists; the gentle pin-tucking at the cuffs of the short sleeves designed to mimic the way guys roll them up; the hood of an anorak that looked like nothing so much as a ruffle.An oversized suit in that electric yellow retained its masculine tang, but only because it was so unapologetically big. Its soft, unlined construction will have Duckie believers going over to the large size. An anorak worn backwards so that its front blousoned in back in a manner that mid-century couturiers would recognize will require a much more adventurous type. In other words, not a jeans and T-shirt man. We hope we see it happen.
14 July 2015
Difficult times call for drastic measures. That was the frame of mind in which Steven Cox and Daniel Silver approached their Fall collection for Duckie Brown. They're not the first designers this season to feel the chill wind of financial hardship. Cox was being typically mordant when he said, "This could be our last show." Yang to Cox's yin, Silver countered with his rationale for the show's title, Tomorrow: "A day that is full of hope and other possibilities."The presentation placed the usual backstage mechanics up front. "A chance to be transparent," said Silver. "Let's open up the wall. We can watch you while you watch us." In the circumstances, it felt like a valuable reminder of the pell-mell work that goes into getting a collection out into the world, especially given that the clothes themselves had such serenity this time. Cox made a subtle but strong, almost philosophical statement about the maturing of Duckie Brown. He was reflecting on the beginnings of the label, when the Duckies were a little like the class clowns of New York menswear. "I was asking myself, 'Can a designer age in this industry of Kim Kardashian Instagrams?'" he mused. "I'm not the clown anymore. There are no polka dots, no beading, no embroidery, no high waists or low waists or drop crotches… wait, maybe just a little."No, what was on show were pristine white shirts in China silk paired with pleated pants in a luxurious black Japanese polyester; silk cardigans wrapped rather than buttoned, and tucked into gray flannel pants; a Harrington in pink charmeuse with gray flannel pants; a dark, lustrous buffalo check in a wrapped cardigan and matching coat.Maybe it was Cox being his endlessly provocative self when he said this collection reflected his respect for Stefano Pilati. He did, after all, insist that was why he'd grown a beard. But the languid poetry of the clothes did, in fact, share something with Pilati's own aesthetic. It is so rare, precious, and beautiful in New York that it demands support. Last show? No way.
12 February 2015
Mancunian style of the 1990s is ripe territory for menswear designers to find inspiration. "Fools Gold" by the Stone Roses filled the sunlit room at Industria Superstudio today as Duckie Brown presented its Spring 2015 collection, full of bucket hats, sneakers, baggy trousers, plaid, polyester, and classic outerwear. "There's an incredible influence of Manchester, where I went to college," said designer Daniel Silver before the show. "And the Verve—theUrban Hymnsalbum cover." There were no Wallabees in the show, but the conceit was there, and it was still very much Duckie Brown—kooky, traditional, full of dichotomies."There's a slight oddness to the collection," said Silver. "It's not normal." But what Duckie Brown collection is? Masters of twisting proportions, Silver and his partner, Steven Cox, presented a collection that felt like a slight paradigm shift for the brand ("If it doesn't change, you suck," said Cox). Gone were the short-over-long, long-over-short layers. There wasn't a hard shoulder to be found. Therewereplenty of riffs on classic outerwear—the MA-1 bomber, the Harrington jacket, trenchcoats—but the overall concept was something more casual than what you might expect from Duckie Brown. "I think this is the most on-trend we've ever been," said Cox. "Which is not something we normally do."Special attention to fit allowed for a collection that was both precisely tailored and full of interesting play with volume. Wide shirts and outerwear, long-rise trousers, and baggy shorts made the negative spaces between limbs come to life. The fabrics were an experience all their own—dense, dove gray poly trousers; sheer and shimmery pearl outerwear; camel plaids; and the vibrant glittery blue herringbone ender were standouts. It's funny that one of the most underappreciated brands in New York comes with such deep English roots. It doesn't seem likely that this is the collection that will win Duckie Brown a wider appeal stateside or elsewhere, even if it is more on-trend than it's been before. But who cares? As with the Madchester scene to which this lineup pays tribute, it's better off in the hands of a cult following.
4 September 2014
Who is the Duckie Brown woman? After a decade-plus designing menswear, Daniel Silver and Steven Cox put women's clothes on their runway for the first time back in February. They weren't entirely pleased with the results. "We tried to change it too much, it was too womens-y," Silver said at their Spring lookbook shoot. Adjustments have clearly been made. "This season," he continued, "it's all kind of the same." Where the waist was nipped for Fall, it's slouchy now, and where she was wearing pointy heels, for Spring she's sporting the brown suede Florsheim lace-ups the male models will don at the Duckie Brown show later this week. In some cases, the silhouettes are simply sized-down versions of the men's looks. He wears a 40; she's a 28.All of this should please the gals who've long been asking the Duckie designers for women's versions of their classic-with-a-quirk tailoring and separates. But what about the ladies who don't have a Duckie guy in their life, who are unfamiliar with the label? Looking at the bigger fashion picture, it's a good moment for Duckie Brown womenswear. People can't stop talking about normcore, and it doesn't get more normcore than the Duckie Brown muse for Spring. "Everyone wants us to be outrageous," Cox said, "but we're not really outrageous. The essence of Duckie Brown is simple, subtle oddness." Silver's 90-something father is featured on the show invite, and it's his slightly off sensibility—the elasticized waistband, the shirt partially untucked on one side, the penchant for plaid—that informs the styling of the quite normal clothes in both the men's and women's DB offerings. Only the fabrics—woven silks, Japanese polyesters—would be unfamiliar to Silver's dad.For now, Silver and Cox plan to keep the men's and women's collections separate, but considering the way they talk to each other (fashion's other hot topic of the moment is unisex), it'd be interesting to see them reunited on the runway sometime soon.
3 September 2014
"It takes a long time to grow into who you are," Daniel Silver said today, just before he and Steven Cox debuted their first designs for women, alongside another collection of the peerless, provocative clothing that has made Duckie Brown New York's most consistently interesting—and under-celebrated—menswear label. They named their presentation The Duckie Has Two Faces, the latest in their inside-joke plays on the titles of Streisand movies, and an obvious nod to the gender mix on the catwalk. If Silver's words suggested that the move into womenswear somehow completed them, the fact is that Duckie Brown hasalwayshad two faces: scally ladandSavile Row gent, extremeandelegant, butchandfemme. Cox's technical skill has alchemized the opposites beautifully. That much was made perfectly clear on the catwalk today, with a huge amount of help from a soundtrack that mixed Vivaldi and hardcore electronics. So maybe Silver was right after all.But even with the collection done, Cox confessed he was frightened to do womenswear, possibly because he wasn't prepared to do anything so obvious as to simply repurpose menswear for women. "We focused onnotdoing that," he said firmly. "We wanted to make clothes forwomen, not girls." The distinction was important, because Duckie's menswear has often had a quirkiness that reads as boyish, even more so when counterpointed by the gimlet-eyed confidence possessed by the women in today's show. One stellar male ensemble matched an MA-1 bomber jacket in cyclamen with gigolo-tight pants in midnight silk and evening slippers (the men's shoes throughout). Adam the model was a skinhead with a thousand-yard stare. The mix of feyness and menace—fop and hooligan—felt like Cox's ideal match. It was the essence of the men's clothes, which used elaborate tweeds and rich silks for hoodies and trackies, and layered such classically masculine pieces as a peacoat or donkey jacket over narrow silk pants. For women, Cox collaged a Crombie out of pell-mell intarsia, or elongated a T-shirt or sweatshirt into a surprisingly elegant dress (the fabric did the heavy lifting). And he cut some supremely elegant pleated pants.And if that sounds like the womenswear was distinctly straightforward in comparison with the menswear? It was. The short-over-long proportion play that is a Duckie signature was in full effect for the boys, with blousons over coats (the effect was skirtlike) over trousers.
When the blouson was tweed, the skirt was cyclamen pink and the trousers were Chinese red; it nibbled at the confident excess of eighties couture. Cox had actually been looking at the couture of Charles James (beforethe Met announced its upcoming exhibition, he hastened to add). The blue silk evening coat that closed the show was his subtle salute. In comparison with such spectacular follies, "straightforward" couldn't help but look a little tentative. Still, given the glorious indignities Cox and Silver have inflicted on menswear in the past, the girls of the world should feel slightly relieved that Duckie's womenswear debut let them down so gently.
5 February 2014
"It takes a long time to grow into who you are," Daniel Silver said today, just before he and Steven Cox debuted their first designs for women, alongside another collection of the peerless, provocative clothing that has made Duckie Brown New York's most consistently interesting—and under-celebrated—menswear label. They named their presentation The Duckie Has Two Faces, the latest in their inside-joke plays on the titles of Streisand movies, and an obvious nod to the gender mix on the catwalk. If Silver's words suggested that the move into womenswear somehow completed them, the fact is that Duckie Brown hasalwayshad two faces: scally ladandSavile Row gent, extremeandelegant, butchandfemme. Cox's technical skill has alchemized the opposites beautifully. That much was made perfectly clear on the catwalk today, with a huge amount of help from a soundtrack that mixed Vivaldi and hardcore electronics. So maybe Silver was right after all.But even with the collection done, Cox confessed he was frightened to do womenswear, possibly because he wasn't prepared to do anything so obvious as to simply repurpose menswear for women. "We focused onnotdoing that," he said firmly. "We wanted to make clothes forwomen, not girls." The distinction was important, because Duckie's menswear has often had a quirkiness that reads as boyish, even more so when counterpointed by the gimlet-eyed confidence possessed by the women in today's show. One stellar male ensemble matched an MA-1 bomber jacket in cyclamen with gigolo-tight pants in midnight silk and evening slippers (the men's shoes throughout). Adam the model was a skinhead with a thousand-yard stare. The mix of feyness and menace—fop and hooligan—felt like Cox's ideal match. It was the essence of the men's clothes, which used elaborate tweeds and rich silks for hoodies and trackies, and layered such classically masculine pieces as a peacoat or donkey jacket over narrow silk pants. For women, Cox collaged a Crombie out of pell-mell intarsia, or elongated a T-shirt or sweatshirt into a surprisingly elegant dress (the fabric did the heavy lifting). And he cut some supremely elegant pleated pants.And if that sounds like the womenswear was distinctly straightforward in comparison with the menswear? It was. The short-over-long proportion play that is a Duckie signature was in full effect for the boys, with blousons over coats (the effect was skirtlike) over trousers.
When the blouson was tweed, the skirt was cyclamen pink and the trousers were Chinese red; it nibbled at the confident excess of eighties couture. Cox had actually been looking at the couture of Charles James (beforethe Met announced its upcoming exhibition, he hastened to add). The blue silk evening coat that closed the show was his subtle salute. In comparison with such spectacular follies, "straightforward" couldn't help but look a little tentative. Still, given the glorious indignities Cox and Silver have inflicted on menswear in the past, the girls of the world should feel slightly relieved that Duckie's womenswear debut let them down so gently.
5 February 2014
"Dress like a boy, talk like a girl." Leikeli47's rap on the soundtrack was an aggressive reiteration of Duckie Brown's ongoing assault on the stereotypical. Steven Cox and Daniel Silver make menswear that is never anything less than intensely masculine. It's just that their man is no run-of-the-mill testosterone sac. Cox's incorrigible desire to mess with his audience's minds meant that today's models sported a bowl cut inspired by Purdey, the character that Joanna Lumley played in the cult Brit TV showThe New Avengers,but that cheesy femme quality was counterbalanced by outfits that were, claimed Cox, at least partially influenced by photos of South African farm workers. At its most literal, this influence elaborated on the market-trader vibe of last season, with aprons cut from jute sacks of a fair-trade provenance, but otherwise the African association felt like something more elegant, more North than South. There's usually something a bit fantastical in a DB collection, and here it arrived in the vision of Cox's short-over-long-over-pants layering in pure white cotton or desert khaki or stripes, dropped crotch optional. In other words, clothes fit for a stylish young man-about-Marrakech.Which is perhaps a littletoofantastical, given that the collection was possibly Duckie Brown's most refined challenge to date to hidebound Western notions of what constitutes appropriateness in menswear. (Cue Leikeli47's urgent declamations.) And yet what looked at first view like yet another rejoining of the men-in-skirts debate was actually Cox's twisty little deconstruction of the very foundations ofsports-wear. A halter-top shift was an elongated sweatshirt with the sleeves taken out. A skirt was simply basketball shorts with the seams opened up. Paired with a polo shirt, it wasn't so hard to picture it on one of the laddish football fanatics that Cox admired from afar in his impressionable English youth. Turning the familiar into something strange, making you look at it anew—it's always been this way with Duckie Brown. And if there's anyone in New York who can seduce the butchest boy on the block into wearing a blouson cut from fine French lace, it's these two.
5 September 2013
It's a significant part of Duckie Brown legend that every collection title references in some way the oeuvre of Barbra Streisand. Though it's been so for more than a decade, the well may be running a little dry on that conceit. Today's presentation was called Duckyl (cf.Yentl), and when the music suddenly stopped partway through the show, it was all but impossible not to shriek, "Papa, I can't hear you." Still, as the Slits so memorably declaimed in the glory days of punk, silence is a rhythm, too. And when the music started up again for the models' final walk-out, it was just as hard to resist the notion that it was all quite deliberate on the part of Steven Cox and Daniel Silver. They're not playing anyone else's game. They'll do anything to make you stop and think about what it is you're looking at. "We're always asking why," said Cox after the show. "Why does a coat have to be on top? Why not put the structure underneath?"In many other designers' hands, such questions often lead to arbitrary exercises in fashion flimflammery, but Cox's technique is so strong that Duckie Brown has always been able to transmute his most arcane notions into strong—albeit utterly idiosyncratic—revisions of masculinity. Today's collection may have been a career high. One key silhouette was a bomber over an overcoat, compounded by a double pant. Such layering is standard garb for the men who work in London's markets—and God help the individual who impugnstheirbutchness—but Cox turned the long-under-short idea into a meditation on proportion. There were no shirts, just utility-influenced coats made of shirting that sat under shorter outerwear, or an elongated sweatshirt under, say, a denim jacket. And however skewed it all seemed, a fundamental sobriety tied it all together, always with an eye to the classic Harris tweed or camel.But it wouldn't be Duckie Brown if there wasn't some element that took that sobriety, flipped it on its pointy little head, and fucked with it. In a collection that was strong on items, one of the strongest was a back-buttoning coat (more like a tunic) in a deep violet. It had that bad old Saint Laurent "do me up, baby" frisson. Which was a reminder of how much of their own story Cox and Silver have managed to infuse their work with. If you think you saw a Hudson's Bay blanket in a coat today, you did. And that was Cox tipping his cap to Silver's Canadian roots.The collection was made with passion—and it showed.
6 February 2013
"Riding the wave." That's how Daniel Silver described this moment in the career of Duckie Brown. A profile in theTimes,webisodes on The Daily Beast, buzz surrounding Silver and partner Steven Cox's Perry Ellis debut next week…It all adds up to a big fat about-time for a duo who have toiled tirelessly in the face of indifference, incomprehension, or plain ignorance for season after season—is it really 11 years already? So how do they capitalize on this moment for their own collection? By pushing just that little bit farther out, making it just that little bit harder for neophytes to see what pleasures they've been missing out on all these years.The new collection was, in fact, called Duckie Pleasures. There was the usual Barbra connection, this timeGuilty Pleasures,her collab with Barry Gibb. The delicious sense of shame that derives from doing something really wrong matched the porn-y pic on the invite and the harnesslike "belt loops" created by master glove-maker Daniel Storto, and, in a skewed way, it also tapped into the surreal essence of the collection. On the one hand, it was the most muscular lineup the boys have offered. Indigo Japanese denim, black leather, punky red tartan, and an appetite for well-inked models were the ingredients of a particularly savory urban dish. But on the other hand, there was a peculiarly technical haute couture undertow that made some of the outfits read like Cristobal for the boys. The way that sleeves were set in tops of double-faced cotton echoed Balenciaga's experiments in volume. One jacket erupted into a flower of black denim that was as artfully crafted as an evening dress. Sober Harringtons were scissored into vulnerable backlessness. The ancient Japanese technique of fabric dyeing called shibori transformed plaid pants. Even the enormous cuffs on shorts and trousers (Duckie's 80-year-old tailor calls them passport cuffs, because they're big enough to slip travel documents into) had a precise, sissy formality that suggested something not of New York streets in the year of our Lord 2013.In an ideal world, people are going to get to know Cox and Silver better in the coming seasons. This typically fearless collection, with its astute encapsulation of Duckie Brown's contrary, perverse, but immaculately crafted aesthetic, made a perfect place to start the meet-and-greet.
5 September 2012
Last season was produced under the shadow of family tragedy, so it was understandably a somber collection from Duckie Brown, but Steven Cox found the downbeat mood persisted when he started work on Fall. Everything was still black. But black took him to a lush barathea, the fabric from which tuxedos are cut, and Cox began to feel better. Then a book about ballet renegade Michael Clark got him thinking about the avant-garde sportiness of Clark and his buddies from Body Map in London in the mid-eighties. By which time Cox was feelingmuchbetter.It showed on the catwalk, where Cox and partner Daniel Silver's off-kilter design signature—serious substance and irreverent style comfortably coexisting—was in full effect. A country squire might have recognized the classic herringbones, tweeds, and tartans, but he'd have been flummoxed by the silhouettes, either tailored to unyielding trimness, or exploding into extreme volumes, usually in the same outfit. The Duckie duo are past masters of disorientation. Here, the languor of floppy pants, the literal twists of bias, and circular cutting evoked the don't-give-a-damn dressiness of thehomme fatal. A particularly chiseled model casting helped. So did theGrey Gardensheadgear.It's too easy to attach the androgyny label—and Cox is too in thrall to the English lad culture of his youth for it to stick—but the typically odd echoes in this collection did strike the hybrid note that makes Duckie Brown so unique in New York. Cox acknowledged it with his own label: "hiking evening." And maybe it was just the soundtrack that sparked another hybrid association, but if anyone is going to put rave couture on a catwalk, it'll surely be Cox and Silver, which makes the challenge of their new gig at Perry Ellis all the more intriguing. Remember what Perry did for the man called Marc.
8 February 2012
With all the floss that's spun about "heritage" fashion, it's curiously refreshing to encounter a take on the past so personal that it almost feels like voyeurism to be outside looking in. After today's Duckie Brown show, Steven Cox flummoxed the backstage flock with his references to "the Bexleyheath boys." What he meant were the cool kids in the part of South London where he grew up, their style a distillation of the purest sportswear (the Brits call these clothing cultists "casuals"). "A solitary boy in a tracksuit," was Cox's misty reminiscence, "with a pint of Stella and a packet of cheese-and-onion crisps." So that's where the new Duckie collection began (with the tracksuit, not the crisps), in lean layers of sporty black nylon.The description of the clothes suggested volume—a puffer vest, a six-pleated pant—but there was only somber elongation. The puffer was deflated. The melancholic reason for this was in the show's dedication "to Diane." Cox's mother died three weeks ago after a long illness, and the shadow of her passing made this a very difficult collection for Cox and his partner, Daniel Silver. That undoubtedly explained its subdued quality, and also the sense of escape into a past that was easier to cope with than the painful present. But at the same time, the elegiac mood loaned the collection a persuasive narrative drive, from that prosaic nylon opening passage to a finale of rose-printed organzas and silks. The same silhouettes connected the two—parka, bomber, sporty short shorts—but there was a clear shift in sensibility toward, in the end, emotion and beauty. If you ever wanted proof of a designer using what he does as balm for a bruised soul, here it was.
7 September 2011
Last season, Steven Cox and Daniel Silver spun the hands of time backward, opening with the restrained control of their most recent collections, closing with the fabulous delirium of their early days. After that career overview in reverse, they opted for consolidation with their latest. The first look—a straitjacket knit with asymmetrically wrapped trousers—suggested the like-me-if-you-dare quality that has been both blessing and bane throughout the Duckie saga. It was mercifully followed by a short but sweet series of immaculately realized items, as straightforward as a black cashmere Crombie, as inventive as a canvas peacoat digitally printed with an image of crumpled knitwear. There were none of the usual Duckie distractions: no scarves or gloves. No shirts, either. Just twisted knitwear under jackets and coats.Cox described the collection as "our most beautiful." It was easy to see why he would feel like that. The guy is a born tailor, which he proved with his mastery of the difficult eight-pleated trousers that were the keynote of this outing. They made a striking partner to the trim three-button jacket with high armholes. Charlie Chaplin might be one reference point. And how's Chanel for another? A coat, a jacket, a sweatshirt in something the designers called "a bruised tweed" had distant whispers ofla vraieCoco. The fact that they were anchored by Duckie Brown's reworking of the Ludgate boot—a chunky style dating back to 1909 from the Florsheim archives—only enhanced the typically skewed nature of the collection.That skewed quality has been obvious from day one in Cox and Silver's strange allegiance to Barbra Streisand, whom they like to reference in their show titles. Here, it was Duckie People. Let's indulge them for one mad moment. People who need—and can find—Duckie Brown are the luckiest people in the world.
9 February 2011
Steven Cox and Daniel Silver's evolution as designers has taken them from merry pranksters to (relatively) sober upholders of menswear tradition. Their latest show threw that evolutionary process into reverse, opening in a gray mood as restrained as the models' slicked-down side parts and climaxing in the whacked-out excess of a huge jacket in pink tweed thrown over a long, gauzy plaid shirt and baggy gingham trousers. (By this point, the slicked-down hair had also gone wild.)Between the two extremes, we were treated to an oversize zebra-print silk shirt worn over a thigh-length pink tank and windowpane-check cargo pants, a leopard-print blouson over tartan trousers, more tartan paired with a knee-length chiffon shirt printed with serried ranks of cockroaches…are you getting the picture yet? Color, pattern, and the clash of same were the key. "Like the boys had dressed in the dark," said Silver. "Or like a rave, building to a frenzy in the end," added Cox.It was, quite literally, vintage Duckie Brown in its revisiting of the long-over-longer proportion, the drop-crotch pant (here as juicily coloured sweats), and the almost feminine bias cutting, which produced, for instance, a shirt in cyclamen chiffon that tied to one side. Most welcome of all, humor was back. There were still plenty of individual pieces here for anyone who has been drawn to Duckie by the precision and somber clarity of recent collections, but those in touch with their inner raver will relish the renaissance of the prankster and go for head-to-toe broke, from the multicolored beanies to the woven suede moccs by Florsheim.
9 September 2010
Style.com did not review the Fall 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
10 February 2010
Style.com did not review the Spring 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
9 September 2009
The invitation boasted Elizabeth II and her consort Philip in a perfectly posed portrait of marital bliss. Cue signals sent about the composed verities of hidebound tradition—which were blithely upended when a pre-show blast of blistering techno faded away to the pregnant silence that prevailed for the duration of the show. In a mere 21 outfits, Steven Cox and Daniel Silver made a stunning statement about contemporary menswear—possibly the most intelligent catwalk display that Manhattan's men's shows have ever managed—with a presentation that perversely evoked the golden age of haute couture, when models would walk in somber silence while clients focused on the cut of the clothes. And there was plenty of cut to contemplate. The collection was uniformly dark (another couture reference: Balenciaga, the fountain of all things enduringly fashionable, would always parade one all-black outfit to highlight his newest silhouette), which means that photographs can never do justice to its textures and tones (or the luxe of the fabrics).Perhaps that was Cox and Silver's way of emphasizing that these were clothes designed to be primarily appreciated by the person who wears them. Hence, the collection's quiet classicism: pinstripe, herringbone, shearling, Prince of Wales and windowpane checks. But these menswear clichés were reconfigured as Duckie Brown classics. Their signature short-over-long proportion, for instance, appeared time and again in a newly restrained version as a nylon parka over a suit (sometimes with a knapsack). The union of formal and casual—it also suggested man and boy—evoked Raf Simons' preoccupations. So did the fabric research. A stiffened, crumpled nylon, used for an army jacket and a trench, looked like paper. Evening looks were the essence of male glamour. They included a lace sweater and a sweatshirt in a Prince of Wales check made up of Duckie's signature extravagant beading. The allure of these clothes is incontestable. Much more contentious is the name on the label. Arch and amusing that name may be, but it is possibly distracting people from the substance of Cox and Silver's work. Look again, guys, because you have no idea what you're missing.
31 January 2008
Here's one of New York menswear's enduring mysteries: Why isn't Duckie Brown the toast of the town? Is it the name, so redolent of the camp associations of Steven Cox's London background? Is it that Cox and partner Daniel Silver don't travel around the city in a love-me kind of way? Or is it, perhaps—and this is, of course, the scariest notion—that they're so far ahead of the local game, they're doomed to the thankless role of prophets without honor in their own land? Whatever the case, it's a crying shame, because there is a probing, frontier-challenging joy in what Duckie does.Cox and Silver called their new collection Classical Duckie in a probably doomed bid to communicate what they think of as accessibility. Among the ways the idea translated on the catwalk were their habitual play with proportion (as in a cropped trench over a white shirt that was almost floor-length, worn over white trousers) and a color sense so absolutely un-American (at least as American menswear designers see color) that it made one smile. Hence, pleated pants in a rich raspberry paired with a white shirt in handkerchief linen, and prints of peonies and roses adorning both shirts and pants, again voluminous. Cox is responsible for those volumes, and he has no peers in New York. It was not simply the full pleats and dropped crotches (a tricky Duckie signature that here looked reassuring rather than repulsive), it was also the hoodie stretched to cowl-like proportions. As in the past, the emphasis on tailoring broadcast the duo's seriousness of purpose, even though a three-piece pinstripe suit had a hint of that dropped crotch. But Cox and Silver couldn't help themselves. They broke the bank with an evening group of antique-sequined tops. Classical Duckie? More like classical Barbra.
4 September 2007
The first outfit read like a manifesto: gray flannel pinstripes worn with high-tops and turquoise mitts. There, in a nutshell, was the evolution of Duckie Brown. Steven Cox and Daniel Silver have always woven their own lives into their work, so here was Englishman Cox's banker brother in his pinstriped suit and blue shirt. But the non-banker shoes and gloves took the look to the edge the duo have made their own. If they were inspired by the conservatism of a family member on the one hand, on the other, they borrowed the collection's neon accents ("limoncello" said the show notes) from their design hero Stephen Sprouse. The rest of the collection made a similar point of forcing confrontations between the classic and the off-kilter. Best of all was probably an overcoat in double-faced cashmere in a gorgeous shade of apple green, with a caviar-beaded sweatshirt running a close second.Those were only Duckie's most dramatic transmogrifications of the familiar. Lacquered wool trousers with a double waistband, or an elongated piqué evening shirt were more subtle variants. And, while the duo's signature drop-crotched pant has been spotted on other catwalks this season, the original is still the greatest. Given their play with proportions in the past, Cox and Silver's cashmere leggings had more integrity than some of the other pipe-cleaner silhouettes we've seen for fall. Cashmere leggings, you say? Oh, yes, Duckie Brown is playing with the big boys. And caviar beading doesn't come cheap, either, even when it's offered as a panda face on an "evening hoodie." (After the show, Silver tried to insist that the beaded sweatshirt was "less than a one-bedroom apartment in New York.") Let's just say that the most intriguing relationship on the New York menswear scene just got more interesting.
1 February 2007
Given the wackiness that used to distinguish their presentations, it seemed unlikely that Steven Cox and Daniel Silver would turn their label Duckie Brown into such an assured poke in the eye of mainstream American menswear. And yet that's where they've been heading. For spring, they even pitched their tent in the backyard of a sportswear deity: circa-seventies Calvin Klein (at least that's who Silver claimed as inspiration for the collection's sweatshirts). But it was Rei Kawakubo who sprang to mind when a jacket or sweats came down the catwalk peppered with holes like a postmodern lace. The play on proportions also had a Japanese flavor. Mind you, the dropped crotch has always been a Duckie signature, but here it exploded in all directions, into drawstring pants so voluminous the young mannequin had trouble walking. From the first outfit (a lo-o-ong white shirt over wide trousers under a short, tailored jacket), oversize was key to the collection. "Comfort and drape" were the goals, said Silver. The comfort factor was obvious in something as simple as a black polo with baggy black pants, the drape equally so in a "waistcoat" that wasn't much more than a huge swatch of fabric. In the case of those sweatshirt salutes to Calvin, necklines were scooped front and back, the scoop in some cases echoed by tone-on-tone beading, another Duckie signature. The droll Duckie of old resurfaced in the "Memories of NY" print on a shorts suit. It was made up of vignettes of Cox and Silver's life, sketched by an intern (who gets a percentage of sales) in their studio.
9 September 2006
The venue—a mirrored salon in the Carlyle Hotel—spoke volumes. Steven Cox and Daniel Silver, unabashed purveyors of fashion wackiness, were taking their label Duckie Brown uptown, and to prove the point, the first outfit was a dark gray houndstooth crombie. "It's our most serious, most classic collection," said Cox, confirming the shift in sensibility. "And our most experimental," he quickly added.If at first glance the uncharacteristically somber palette appeared to give the lie to that statement, a closer look revealed Duckie's signature odd cuts to be present and accounted for, especially in full trousers draped and gathered at the waist. And items were doubled up in trompe l'oeil effects: a waistcoat over a jacket, both with a lacquered sheen, or wrap shorts over full trousers with a matching jacket.The peculiar little details that have always distinguished Cox and Silver's clothes were more subtle than usual. A white shirt was beaded in black, suggesting it had been slashed by animal claws. Silver said they'd been inspired by a children's tale about a scary night, which was a salutary reminder that part of the charm of the Duckie Brown label rests on the fact that it's in touch with its inner child. The final jacket, whorled in bright colors, was further proof that, for all the new seriousness, Cox and Silver haven't lost that touch.
5 February 2006
The large drawing of a cheekily naked old imp at the end of the catwalk signposted one of the inspirations for Steven Cox and Daniel Silver's latest Duckie Brown collection: the story of the Emperor's new clothes. Another influence they cited backstage was pop-up books. Together these two notions go a long way toward explaining the playfulness of both the clothes and the presentation: the polka dots, the primary colors, the goofy proportions, the deluge of bubbles at the finale. But the real source of the kidult campiness that is Duckie's unique selling point in New York lies in the third inspiration they listed: themselves. According to Cox and Silver, they started with their own personalities when they designed this collection. And what shiny, happy people they must be to give their clothes such a sheen.The show opener, a glazed Crombie, was the prelude to, among other glittering prizes, a Lurex sweatpant, a black sequined sweatshirt, and a matching top and pant in "reversible shiny seaweed green." Tucked away in odd corners of jackets and trousers, meanwhile, were little flourishes of hand-embroidery and -beading: a Lesage zebra on a pair of trousers, a beaded turtle on a shirt, stick men on the back of jackets. The final "evening" jacket featured a clutch of big, beaded medals across its chest. Trousers were distinguished by a "cummerback," a half-cummerbund stitched to the waistband.Fun aside, Cox and Silver never stopped their serious experiments with novel cuts. Theirs is an emperor who will never go naked.
9 September 2005
Everything is coming up roses for Duckie Brown designers Steven Cox and Daniel Silver. Make thatMonacoroses, because a trip to the South of France influenced the colors in this collection: a hot rose-pink turned up in corduroy trousers, a wool coat was a blast of bright yellow, and a jacket arrived in an equally hot orange (they called it Terry's Orange, after an English brand of chocolate—the show marked 14 years to the day since Cox's arrival from London).Backstage, Silver sounded almost straight-faced when he voiced Duckie Brown's mission statement: "To dress men beautifully and elegantly in a royal fashion." More to the point was what came next: "There's always a wink—it has to make us laugh or feel a bit naughty." So the royalty the duo had in mind were Queens Elizabeth I and II. That orange jacket showed with a pair of black trousers printed in gold with the royal corgis, who were also beaded on a shirt. A sweater named Elizabeth was beaded on the back with huge, penetrating eyes (the Queen is watching you!). A spirit of exuberant camp also infused jackets in silver Lurex, gold damask, and a green-and-black houndstooth shot through with gold thread, or a beaded tartan suit, or even the cashmere-silk long johns. And if all the tailoring hinted at the seriousness of Duckie Brown's growing business, the trousers still came with dropped crotches or narrow and cropped over bovver-boy boots provided by sponsor Dr. Martens.
3 February 2005
Color is one of the big stories of this season's menswear shows, and no one took the theme more to heart than Duckie Brown. The line's designers, Steven Cox and Daniel Silver, didn't stick to one or two shades, though. They pulled out the full rainbow: apple red, turquoise, purple, orange, yellow, green. This worked most successfully in focused, well-tailored looks, like an electric-blue corduroy one-button suit with a blue X-ray-stripe shirt, or a green/navy gingham double-layered shirt jauntily paired with a green trouser and topped off with an orange bamboo hat. Elsewhere, the mix-and-match approach was less effective: for example, a turquoise superstripe short-sleeve shirt and green long-short combo, oddly accessorized with a gray-stripe bamboo scarf. Even in a misstep like this one, though, the design duo's talent for tailoring shone through. With their attention to fit and colorful flair, they are talents worth watching.
7 September 2004