Keanan Duffty: Fashion, Music, and the City of Angels
From New York Fashion Week to USC, Keanan Duffty brings three decades of fashion, music, and creative collaboration to Los Angeles
For Keanan Duffty, Los Angeles is not a reinvention. It is the next chapter.
After more than three decades in New York—and a career spanning fashion, music, publishing, and higher education—the award-winning British fashion designer, musician, author, and educator has relocated to Los Angeles. His move brings him closer to the creative ecosystem of the city while expanding his work at the University of Southern California.
“I’m delighted to be in Los Angeles,” says Duffty. “After living in New York for 33 years, with a brief three-year stint in Northern California, I’m excited to be on campus and fully immersed in the creative energy of USC Iovine and Young Academy and the Roski School of Art and Design.”
It is a fitting move for someone whose career has always resisted easy categorization.
A graduate of London’s prestigious Central Saint Martins, whose alumni include Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, and John Galliano, Duffty earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with first-class honors before moving to New York in 1993. There, he established his Slinky Vagabond fashion label and quickly became part of the city’s independent fashion and music scene.
By 1999, his collections were being presented during New York Fashion Week. In 2001, Duffty and his wife, Nancy Garcia, opened a design studio in SoHo and a Slinky Vagabond retail store on Spring Street in Nolita. His collections went on to reach an international audience, selling through more than 150 retailers, including Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale’s, and Barneys in New York; Harvey Nichols and Harrods in London; Lane Crawford in Hong Kong; and stores throughout Japan.
In 2007, Duffty joined the Council of Fashion Designers of America, further establishing his place within the American fashion industry.
But fashion was only part of the story.
Fashion Meets Rock ’n’ Roll
Music has been woven into Duffty’s creative life from the beginning. His collaborations have brought him into the orbit of some of the most influential figures in British and American popular culture.
In 2003, he designed stage outfits for the Sex Pistols during their American tour. Four years later, he collaborated with David Bowie on Bowie by Keanan Duffty, a fashion collection created for Target. In 2016, Duffty styled the CFDA Board of Directors Tribute Award posthumously honoring Bowie, an event featuring Tilda Swinton and Michael C. Hall, as well as original Bowie stage costumes by Kansai Yamamoto and Donatella Versace.
His fashion collaborations have included Aveda, Dr. Martens, Gola, Reebok, Medicom Toy, and Kidrobot. He has served as Design Director for John Varvatos and Ben Sherman and worked with Gwen Stefani’s L.A.M.B. He has also collaborated with musicians David Sylvian and Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols on exclusive, signed and numbered T-shirt collections.
In March 2022, Duffty presented a career retrospective runway show at El Paseo Fashion Week in Palm Springs, bringing together decades of his fashion work in a distinctly Californian setting.
Yet Duffty has never approached music simply as a source of fashion inspiration. He has been a musician in his own right since his early years, performing with punk band Sordid Details and electronic group Wonder Stories and releasing a series of studio recordings.
His musical career includes albums such as the EDM-flavored Watersport, originally released in 1985 and remixed in 2025 by Berlin-based producer Mark Reeder, whose credits include Pet Shop Boys, Depeche Mode, and New Order, together with London electro duo Cult With No Name, known for Blue Velvet Revisited and Propaganda.
In 2007, Duffty co-founded the rock supergroup Slinky Vagabond with Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock, Blondie drummer Clem Burke, and guitarist Earl Slick, whose credits include David Bowie and John Lennon. The band made its live debut alongside the New York Dolls at the Joey Ramone Birthday Bash in New York, performing in support of the Lymphoma Research Foundation.
Since then, Slinky Vagabond has evolved into a creative vehicle through which Duffty continues to connect fashion, art, and music.
The band’s 2021 album, King Boy Vandals, was created with guitarist, producer, and songwriter Fabio Fabbri and featured an extraordinary roster of musicians, including Midge Ure, Dave Formula, Richard Fortus, David Torn, Tony Bowers, and Martin Turner. The album’s first single, “The Beauty in You,” was mixed by Grammy Award-winning producer Mario McNulty. Forbes subsequently named King Boy Vandals among its notable albums of 2021.
The band’s 2025 release, The Eternal Return, continued Duffty’s collaboration with Fabbri and featured Bowie pianist Mike Garson, Ava Cherry, fretless-bass pioneer Percy Jones, and keyboardist Dom Beken. The album included “Perfect World,” co-written with Glen Matlock, and “End of the Show,” co-written with Earl Slick.
In July 2026, Slinky Vagabond released Acoustic Neu Romantics, an acoustic reinterpretation of the band’s catalog that strips away some of its trademark New York glam-rock excess in favor of a more intimate sound. The album also introduces new material and once again brings together an impressive collection of collaborators.
Duffty’s relationship with music has extended well beyond the recording studio.
He performed at the Marc Bolan 30th Anniversary Show at New York’s Delacorte Theatre in Central Park alongside Clem Burke, Patti Smith, Jake Shears, the New York Dolls, and Moby. During the Tommy Hilfiger Sessions at Webster Hall in 2008, he performed “Pretty Vacant” alongside Dave Navarro, Matt Sorum, and the supergroup Camp Freddy.
In 2023, Duffty joined Ava Cherry onstage at the David Bowie World Fan Convention in New York to perform “The Jean Genie,” followed by “Starman” and “Ziggy Stardust” with Bowie alumni Kevin Armstrong and Mark Plati. He returned to the convention in Liverpool in 2024.
In 2025, Education Through Music recognized Duffty with its Music Innovation Award for his contributions to the intersection of music and design and his mentorship of emerging talent.
From Designer to Educator
Duffty’s creative résumé could easily fill a magazine feature on its own. But another dimension of his career has become increasingly central: education.
For sixteen years, he has worked extensively in higher education, bringing professional experience in fashion, entrepreneurship, branding, merchandising, creative direction, and music into the classroom.
He founded the Master’s in Fashion Management program at Parsons School of Design in New York and served as its inaugural Director. Before joining Parsons, he was Director of Merchandising at Academy of Art University in San Francisco and a professor at Polimoda in Florence, Italy.
In January 2023, Duffty was appointed Dean of the Miami campus of Istituto Marangoni, where he served until late 2024.
In 2024, he joined the University of Southern California’s Jimmy Iovine and Andre “Dr. Dre” Young Academy, where his work focuses on fashion innovation and interdisciplinary creative education. He also teaches fashion studio courses through USC Roski School of Art and Design.
His move to Los Angeles now places him directly within the environment he has increasingly explored through his teaching: a culture where fashion, music, technology, entertainment, entrepreneurship, and popular culture continually collide.
That convergence is central to Duffty’s approach to education. Rather than treating fashion as an isolated discipline, he encourages students to understand the broader creative and commercial systems surrounding it.
It is an approach informed by experience.
“In all my years, I can’t think of anyone who is as dedicated to their students, and positive and encouraging—but also experienced, talented, and inspirational to students—as you,” says Sara Kozlowski, Vice President of Program Strategies and Education at the Council of Fashion Designers of America.
Writing the Fashion Industry
Duffty has also documented his experience and perspective through publishing.
He co-authored Rebel Rebel: Anti-Style with British journalist Paul Gorman, published by Rizzoli in 2009. The book examined fashion through the lens of rebellion, subculture, music, and anti-establishment style.
In 2024, Hachette published Duffty’s The Fashion Entrepreneur: The Definitive Guide to Building Your Brand. The book reflects his broader interest in the business of fashion and the realities of building creative brands in a rapidly changing industry.
That entrepreneurial perspective runs through much of his work with students today.
For Duffty, the fashion designer of the future is unlikely to operate within a single discipline. Designers need to understand brand building, technology, entertainment, sustainability, communication, business, and culture—and, increasingly, how all of those systems intersect.
Los Angeles may be the ideal laboratory for that philosophy.
The Hollywood Chapter
Duffty’s arrival in Los Angeles feels less like a departure from his past than a convergence of everything that came before it.
New York gave him fashion. London gave him his design education. Music gave him a creative language that has accompanied him throughout his career. Higher education gave him a platform for passing that experience to a new generation.
Los Angeles offers the opportunity to bring all of those worlds together.
Here, fashion exists alongside film, television, music, technology, gaming, art, and entrepreneurship. The boundaries between designer, performer, creative director, educator, and entrepreneur are increasingly fluid.
Duffty has spent his career working precisely in those spaces between disciplines.
From Central Saint Martins to New York Fashion Week, from the Sex Pistols and David Bowie to USC and Slinky Vagabond, his career has consistently followed the same instinct: connect worlds that are not usually expected to meet.
Now, with Los Angeles as his home, Keanan Duffty is entering a new stage of that journey.
Hollywood, it seems, may have been waiting for him.
