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.’”