“The first thing when we started working on this was like, okay, it needs to smell good,” explains Duckie Brown’s Steven Cox on a recent zoom. We aren’t meeting to talk about the launch of a new fragrance (maybe someday!) but rather the release of Duckie Brown The Book/2024, a sweeping self-published monograph that celebrates 25 years of the beloved New York label.
“It took us a long time because we started to gather money for scanning and for retouching—the cost of that was so enormous, so we just stopped—and then it was Covid,” Cox’s partner Daniel Silver recalls. “And it wasn’t until I spoke with Tim at Christmas time last year that we started again.” That would be Tim Blanks, the fashion critic and long-time friend of the Duckies who stressed the need for the book to exist as evidence of the duo’s importance to the city’s fashion scene. As Blanks wrote in his introduction to the book: “Those incredible, provocative presentations are a memory, and they’re probably happier and doing better than they ever were while they were wrestling with an uncomprehending—or worse, indifferent—fashion industry. But I still feel a lingering sense of injustice. How was it possible that such a dazzling display of imagination and iconoclasm swerved fashion’s gatekeepers?”
You will find no belabored biographical details in this book; instead, Cox and Silver reached out to editors and friends and asked them to submit pieces. (Full disclosure: I myself contributed a short text to the book). But for those curious about the Duckie Brown origin story, the pair met and started dating in 1994 and launched their label in 2001. “We knew what we were getting into by then,” says Silver with a chuckle. “We did 17 pieces, and we went around and showed it to different people. The first few seasons were very quiet, we didn’t have a show until 2003 or 2004.” The pair’s penchant for subverting, expanding, and exploding the concept of what classic men’s tailoring seem par for the course in menswear fashion circa 2024, but they were iconoclasts who played with notions of gender and sexuality through their use of bright colors, bold patterns, and their sense of ease, years before those subjects became buzzwords.
Short pieces of text, varied in tone and concept are sprinkled throughout the book’s 344 pages. There’s also a 5,000-word conversation with the Duckies at a dinner. What you won’t find is runway images. “Runway pictures are never interesting,” says Silver. In fact, they stopped staging fashion shows in 2016, presented a collection consisting of a single look in 2017, and in 2020 embraced a direct-to-consumer model, selling exclusively through Instagram DMs and by appointment in their West Village Studio. They don’t share samples for magazines and they don’t lend to celebrities. Instead the book is “all sketchbooks, photographers’ work, images that we’ve produced, plus our own personal images,” says Cox. With his poetic approach to distilling his ideas, and a sketching style that changes season to season, Cox’s drawings are more accurately described as small mixed-media artworks than standard fashion illustrations.
“In college it was always being pushed on us that our sketches had to be realistic; they had to have a human hand, a human foot—and as you can see there is nothing human about any of these at all,” Cox says, flipping through the book. “The fear of sketching was so overwhelming for me. I had an interview for a job at Armani and they said they loved my sketches but they weren’t ‘classic enough’; they wanted me to do new sketches and I remember bursting out crying in the studio, like ‘I can’t do this, I can’t draw’.”
Cox’s sketches are undoubtedly the gems of the book, which show just how unique the Duckie Brown point of view has always been. How it’s driven not by trends or celebrities, but by feelings and colors and shapes—the mark of true artistry. The designers want the book to be seen by young people and fashion students all over the world. “My goal is for a young person to pick it up and think, ‘Yes I can, too’,” says Silver.
For Cox, going through the pages of the final book was an overwhelming experience. “I purposely hadn’t looked at the book fully ever, and a few weeks ago I sat down at our table with a glass of wine and I opened it up and I just burst out crying. I was very overwhelmed by everything,” he recalls. Still though, it wasn’t all tears. “Getting to smell the book’s 344 sheets? That was fucking fantastic.”
