At Duckie Brown, Skin Is In
Tags: a-departure-for, a-dirty-word, a-lot-more, a-sugary-tweed-, clothes, daniel-silver-, duckie-brown, Fall, flattering-fit-, london, marcio-madeira, north, north-america, steven cox, Style
“Skinhead” may have become a dirty word, unsalvageable in North America in light of its Neanderthal neo-Nazi associations, but when Duckie Brown’s Steven Cox was a teenager in London, it was the style the coolest boys picked up at Merc on Carnaby Street, and that’s what he was remembering with Duckie’s latest. It wasn’t just period, it was place that made this collection a departure for Cox and Daniel Silver. Family matters have taken Cox home a lot more in the past 12 months, so there was a distinctly English feel to the clothes. But if the cropped pants and bovver boots (Duckie for Florsheim) were maybe too specific to find favor with the average man-fash fan, the sleek black and scarlet crombies and the sharp, broad-shouldered tartan jackets—their hard-to-master saddle/rope shoulder a mark of Cox’s acute experience with tailoring—were more than enough to seduce modern dandies. The chord of decadent ambiguity that always gives a Duckie collection its peculiar spice was struck here by an abbreviated trench in an acidic lime shade and a bellows-pocketed jacket in a sugary tweed. But best in show for me was actually a humble jean jacket in dark Japanese denim. In its own subtle way, it was the most effective advertisement for the Duckie mastery of flattering fit.
For full coverage of the Fall 2010 menswear shows, visit www.gq.com/fashion.
