At Band of Outsiders, cabin fever never looked so good
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You started to get an idea of what designer Scott Sternberg was up to for his fall/winter 2010 presentation the moment you stepped inside Milk Studios from the frigid Manhattan cityscape and heard Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ cranking at full blast.
If that subtle nudge didn’t do it, maybe the vintage tanker desk and heap of discarded Corona typewriters clustered on the floor surrounded by crumpled balls of paper might.
But you couldn’t miss it once you spotted the chap literally (and yes, I mean literally) swinging from a crystal chandelier in gray knit sweatpants, and another parked high atop a jumbled pile of wooden chairs, taking phone calls on a Swarovski-crystal-covered rotary telephone wearing a pair of golden yellow nylon ski pants with quilted kneepads.
What we have here folks is ‘The Shining’ level, crazy-making cabin fever. But in this case, all work and no play seems to have made Jack a very stylish boy.
During the packed presentation (in which we also ran across Band of Outsiders fan and former look book star Jason Schwartzman -- who happened to be sporting a pencil-thin mustache that made him come off looking like a Hamish Bowles mini-me), Sternberg explained that a lot of the collection was filled out with the fruits of his recent labors.
‘As we’ve been growing I’ve been able to add more employees,’ he told me. ‘And I’ve been working with some new factories in Italy so I’ve been able to do things I haven’t been able to do before -- like the ski jackets -- those were inspired by old REI ski jackets -- I wasn’t able to do that before.’ (Maybe it’s just because the Olympics are underway in Vancouver, but I could see the U.S. snowboarding team as prime candidates for Band’s take on technical outerwear.)
Ditto for the black and white melange knit sweatpants that looked like the big brother of that favorite pair of warm wool winter socks.The Boy by Band of Outsiders women’s line had its cold-weather standouts as well; favorites included a colorful patchwork fur hooded vest and a gray wool cutaway blazer with a fox fur shawl collar.
If you have to suffer through a frigid February in New York City, that’s the way to do it, and as I stepped back into the Manhattan night, I found myself thinking of a Pink Floyd song from ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ I hadn’t heard playing over Sternberg’s ice capades:
‘Money.’
-- Adam Tschorn in New York
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