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.
