September 5, 2008

Just ask Karl Lagerfeld how much of an incentive for fashion creativity weight loss can be. With their latest collection, Steven Cox and Daniel Silver celebrated the way in which diet and exercise reduced their off-runway profile for Spring 2009. It's a typical fashion paradox that shrinkage breeds expansion, and early retailer response suggests it's already their most successful collection to date. Maybe the world is finally turning Duckie, because it's not like the collection compromised on the label's signatures: the nutzoid proportions, the over-the-top embroidery, the mash-up of salon and street.

Cox and Silver took that most urban of organisms—the bike messenger—as their starting point, hence the baggy shorts over black compression tights that were key to the collection. The stretch didn’t stop at leggings. During the hours that Cox logged at the pool in his pursuit of the body beautiful, he said he was captivated by swimmers in the one-piece suits that Michael Phelps has since made iconic. So, underpinning Duckie's entire Spring collection were stretchy tops, bottoms, hoods, and little glovelets. The eccentricity of such a second-skin notion was compounded by a wide silhouette—echoes of David Byrne's Big Suit. Boxily cut jackets were matched with trousers that were cut on the circle, or shorts that fell to below the knee. There was something almost futuristic about the idea of an athletic body-consciousness wrapped in voluminous tailoring—the best of both worlds, in a way. And even if the collection as a whole didn't have the exquisite focus of last season, it could boast a showpiece (in the sweatshirt where fern embroidery took a prodigious 400 man hours) to rank with Duckie's most glamorous.

— Tim Blanks