After so much time of forced isolation, the desire to meet up with friends is an obvious side-effect. Dean and Dan Caten, party animals longing for pre-pandemic freedom, imagined for resort their cool Dsquared2 posse gathering in after-party mode, chilling into the wee hours. “It’s a sort of an ‘I don’t care mood, whatever mood’ situation,” Dan said during a showroom appointment. “The headframe is definitely not being correct.”
As far as we know, being correct has never been a concern for the Catens, whose take on style is sassy, sexy, glittery, and glam. The pandemic hasn’t curbed their muscular flamboyance, yet resort has an artsy-crafty, grungy quality rather different from the ebullience of their typical collections. They seemed to revel in a sort of free-style, homemade mash-up, where spray-painted graffitis, doodles, scribbles, and tag-style camouflages were amalgamated and layered with vintage-y upholstery florals, spongy tweeds, tie-dye, crochet, flocked and scratched velvet, and bleached denim.
There’s always a method to the madness of the irrepressible Catens. What might sound like complete visual chaos actually looked anything but. The collection had a degree of calculated spontaneity which is testament to the designers’ consummate cool. Cleverly put together, it read like a virtuoso exercise in mismatched assemblages, the sort of DIY styling totally credible for today’s post-pandemic wardrobes.
Canadiana inflected with military, streetwear, and grunge was the crafty blend offered for boys—think oversized camo outerwear, papery-fine tie-dye nylon ripstop jackets, trench coats covered in graffiti, tagged hoodies, and hand-painted, bleached denim. Girls were “more femme but tough,” as they said, with heavy combat boots contrasting sweet prairie florals, grungy spray-painted animalier prints or vintage-y bias-cut dresses, and day-glo-scribbled and intarsia-ed with macramé. Strings of wooden pearls were woven into miniskirts and tops and paired with striped poplin briefs for cheek. Worn nonchalantly over a masculine white poplin shirt, a bralette in Swarovski crystals provided a flash of optimistic sparkle. Even at their grungiest, the Caten twins cannot do without a little bling.
