It’s a warm Saturday in late October, and a dozen bodies spill in and out of a tiny office at Spadina and Queen like circus clowns from a VW Beetle: three PR people, six models and the carnival masters themselves—the Beckerman sisters, who’ve just flown in from New York. Two days from now, these fashion-scene starlets with curvaceous contours, blond locks and burbling ambition will launch their spring line in Toronto.

Physically—and this is what people always say about them because, really, there’s nothing quite as accurate—the 25-year-old twins, Samantha and Caillianne, and their 22-year-old sister, Chloe, look like three alternative versions of teen queen Hilary Duff. Sam is the one wearing vintage Scout badges on a vest with leather fringes; Caillianne is intensely rifling through a Ziploc bag of costume baubles. Next to one of the massive suitcases stuffed full of samples and shoes there’s an expeditious Chloe, pulling out footwear for the show; she’s in town only for a few days before returning to Manhattan to attend her textile-design classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

They flip through binders full of outfits annotated with schoolgirl penmanship. They take Polaroids of the mannequins on parade. They make notes. They fiddle with the massive heart-shaped necklaces around their necks (their own gold-plated creation, some of the proceeds of which are donated to Stephen Lewis’s AIDS foundation). They give their approbations—“that’s hot” or “that’s blinging”—when a girl walks hither and yon in sheer white cut-off tights studded with a rash of Lifesaver-coloured pompoms. And they ask their mother, Rana, who drove them down from the family home near York Mills and Leslie, when they need an opinion on whether the red thigh-high boots work with a virgin-white knee-length dress. “Umm, well, no,” says Rana, a refined beauty whose tastes are more Harper’s Bazaar than her daughters’ Dazed & Confused. “You girls know better,” she says, then turns to me and shrugs. “I’m definitely from another era.” The girls scrap the boots.

Out in the hallway, they watch as a raven-haired model named Shanu strolls past rolling racks and the rows of old-school Reebok RBKs and spray-painted metallic cowboy boots. She wears a naughty Beckerman knit mini-dress—a coquettish black spiderweb over an ivory silk tunic, with a large white knit bow at the chest. It’s a fine party frock, but you have to be a bit of a minx to pull it off. It reminds me of the famous Mae West line: “I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.” Unfettered, mischievous, these Beckerman clothes are almost too much fun.

Later, while adjusting a chunky denim headband the size of a hat, Shanu says this about the sisters: “They’re not, and I don’t know how to say this, but they aren’t quite as elegant as the other designers.” And this is like praising them to the skies. When Shanu did their debut show last spring—after which the line was snatched up by Holt Renfrew—she had “the best fun I had all fashion week.”

And who wouldn’t want to be BFFs with them? They don’t appear to disagree on much. “I guess, yeah, that must seem a bit hard to believe,” says Caillianne (or Cailli, as in “kay-lee”). Of their own free will, not only are they professionally fused, but they live together in an apartment in New York’s East Village (above a couple of bars), and they take vacations together, often with a Pomeranian named Cubby, who inspires their Cubby Couture line of doggie sweaters. They are prolific huggers, and they come at you like heat-seeking missiles with arms open and wide, toothy grins.

The Beckermans’ plenitude of colour, texture and verve is being noticed by fashion editors across the continent, who seem to understand that behind the girlish effervescence they are more than just design novices having a lark. In fact, rare for designers so young, they have a consistent sense of fashion. Their clothes may cloak you in a lot of purple and yellow or a dozen too many pompoms, but the vision behind their lines is refreshingly clear. There is no forced maturity here, no interest in being sedate. Like latter-day Betsey Johnsons, they create clothes you might see on the hottest girl in the hottest gallery on Queen West West. The house of Beckerman is a big, bold firecracker of a thing.