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 chins. 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.
