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Dsquared Sounds of Summer  

WHEN DYNAMIC DQUARED DUO Dan and Dean Caten unleashed their magnificent men's spring/summer 09 collection - packed full of early-era hip-hop references, and boasting live breakdancers - even the most ice-cool of fashion hacks in attendance couldn't avoid a sly tap-of-the-foot here, or a furtive shoulder-shrug there. Why so? Because when it comes to selecting the right sounds, the Canadian-born twosome are certainly no slouches in the sonic department.


‘We always choose and mix the music for our shows’, begins Dean, proudly. 'We like to go with what we're feeling at the time. With this one we wanted it to "take you on a trip", you know? We wanted some of the tracks to be a little rough, some more commercial, obvious or funny - or just super-classic and old school.


Some of them are ones we'd hear when we were these weird little 14-year-old club kids, hanging out with an older crowd, and we used to go to this after-hours club in Canada, called Stages, that started at one in the morning and didn't serve alcohol.'


Hence a highly uplifting set list that worked in perfect synchronicity with not only the clothes being proposed, but with the fine specimens of swaggering manhood - 'dark, Latino, black, gorgeous! Hard to find in Italy, so we flew them in from LA, London and Atlanta!' - who sported said togs with such aplomb.


The Caten's near-impeccably assembled compilation - primarily featuring early hip-hop and house classics - straddled everything from ‘Let the Beat Hit 'Em' by Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam and 'Breaks' by Kurtis Blow to Frankie Knuckles' 'Move Your Body', Maurice's 'This Is Acid' and House Master Boyz' 'House Nation' (though let's turn a deaf ear to the rather unfortunate inclusion of Snap's terminally cack 'The Power'), and threw in Run-DMC's 'It's Like That' for good measure. Creating maximum aural climax, the presentation culminated in Joyce Sims' plaintive electro-disco corker, '(You Are My) All And All' - a late-Eighties dancefloor favourite within Blighty's more discerning nightclubs of the time. 'We used that song in the first fashion show we ever did, Dean reveals. 'That was, like, 20 years ago... so we figured we could use it again by now!'


While it might be tempting to imagine the Catens sweating feverishly over a mixing desk - in some downtown studio, the night before the show - with all manner of complex knob-twiddling and vinyl-rummaging occurring, in fact their musical modus operandi is a little more, well, straightforward: 'We work with a really cool guy and do it on the computer,’ Dean explains. 'It's fun - we sing along with the songs, going, "We want this bit!" and he takes care of the technical side of things. Then we sort of play around with it a lot - like adding dub bits here and there.'

Suffice to say, their love of music - new and old, on or off the runways - has even lead to the occasional bona-fide DJ gig, most notably at a Vanity Fair party a while ago. 'Yeah, it was hysterical, like a house party!' chuckles Dean. 'We played early house, classic Canadian snowboard anthems and really fucked it all up, playing stuff like the theme from Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs!'


Tim Westwood needn’t worry too much just yet, then…