If there’s one thing that we all miss these days it’s traveling. By plane, by boat, by car, by whatever—any means of transportation would actually do, as long as it’s a moving vehicle taking us somewhere other than to our quarantine flat after the umpteenth errand to the grocery store. Stretching the concept to the extreme, why not a motorhome? It’s what the ebullient Caten twins had in mind when they shot their pre-fall look book in a trailer. “We don’t want to look at something safe; we’re all bored stiff from being in this endless lockdown,” said Dan on a Zoom call from his office in Milan. “So give me something exciting that makes me smile and that gets me through. We want to offer fresh, fresh, fresh. Excite me, stimulate me, titillate me, and make me smile. That was our thinking process behind the collections in the caravan situation.”
After their clean-lined, tightly-edited September collection, which was designed coming out of the first lockdown, the Catens felt ready to change gears. “We said, you know what? Our girl likes to travel, she’s a bit of a crazy kid, she wants to have a bit more fun. She’s nonchalant and sassy and free-spirited, she’s going to pack her things, put on what she wants with no rules, and off she goes.” The idea was to jumble together Dsquared2’s greatest hits in a riot of sometimes improbable mash-ups: bandana prints mixed with denim; leopard coats and black lace leggings; patched camouflage nylon and tweed; red-and-black checked shirts thrown over ice-skating minidresses. The same right-is-wrong and wrong-is-right attitude equally applied to the men’s collection: Western influences were juxtaposed with gentlemanly tailoring touches, while distressed leather, argyle knits, and crystal-studded destroyed sweats lived in clashing, yet apparently happy coexistence.
Both collections had great outerwear pieces with a strong outdoorsy feel, which after months of isolation seemed completely, utterly on point. “There’s a bit of British energy, traveling to the countryside, being in nature, fishing, tending the garden,” they said. “Probably because we’ve been watching The Crown! Both the Dsquared2 girls and the guys wear pearls, jewelry, trinkets, charm bracelets, lockets—grandma things, lost & found things, heirlooms of all sorts.” It’s not clear the Queen would’ve approved. “We actually met her!” they exclaimed. “We had something very cool to say to her. We said: ‘Thank you for the sacrifices you made in your life for being our Queen’; we appreciate it so much. She stepped back and said : Oh.’ ”
