Thom Browne (Q2101)
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New York City-based luxury fashion brand
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Thom Browne |
New York City-based luxury fashion brand |
Statements
founder and head of design
The Thom Browne invitation today was an atelier coat in natural muslin, with the brand logo on the back and our names spelled out in cursive on the front left pocket. We were asked to wear them to the show, and it’s a testament to the kind of devotion that Browne breeds that so many of us did, despite the heat of the June afternoon.Muslin, the plain cotton fabric that couture toiles, or samples, are constructed from, was the subject of Browne’s couture collection. A perfectionist of the first order, he’s the last designer you’d expect to lift the curtain on the construction process. In fact, at a preview the day before the show, he admitted to a bout of second guessing. “We kind of questioned, ‘are we sure we’re doing this?’ We love finishing things and perfecting things.”No surprise, his 48 works-in-progress were meticulously worked, all the way down to the hand-basted stitches between two layers of horsehair on the lapel of a jacket. And all the way up to the 11,000 hours and 42 men working around a table it took to achieve the variegated gold beading of a rouleau button-front fitted jacket and pencil skirt.Browne used six different weights of muslin here, choosing the right one for different techniques: light for the frayed strips woven into tweed or stacked into the millefeuille layers decorating the sides of a coatdress, and heavier for the blown-up deconstructed tailoring. Even the yarn used for an open work knitted cardigan was made from muslin wrapped around wire.Half-way down the runway the models paused, striking poses or twirling for the house camera with an embroidery sampler “mask” in front of their face, their chalky white outfits an almost exact match for the limestone walls of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, and their “hair” carved into the curls of ancient statuary. There are always many layers to a Thom Browne show. Given the imminent Olympics, this one had a sportive gloss by way of the gold bullion embroideries of athletes on an hourglass jacket and a bustier dress displaying the muscular system in blood-red beads on one side and pleated and tucked muslin on the other. Capping the proceedings off were a trio of fully embroidered jackets in bronze, silver, and gold.The collection made you consider the connections between elite athletes and couture’s petite mains. The point, Browne said, was to show “the beauty of the hand, rather than a machine.” As the AI age begins, it’s a lesson that bears repeating.
24 June 2024
After a season away, Thom Browne came back to New York Fashion Week and took up the closing spot in spectacular fashion. The last time he was on a runway was July, when he made his couture debut at the Opera Garnier in Paris in his trademark theatrical style. Today he was back at the Shed in Hudson Yards, where he last staged his own retelling ofThe Little Prince. This time around, it was Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 poemThe Raventhat inspired his mise en scène: In a snowy yard a bare limbed tree dressed in a giant Thom Browne puffer coat stood guard, with a model animating its branches; behind it was a lit window with a broken pane through which the other models emerged.Browne’s shows are as much about theater as they are about showcasing his latest clothes. In Poe’s poem, a grieving student is visited by a raven who answers all his questions about his lost love Lenore with the same word: “nevermore.” It’s a story about loss and despair told in the most musical of language: “That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.”At a showroom visit ahead of his show, Browne was asked if perhaps he’s tormented likeThe Raven’s protagonist, and laughed it off. “I grew up loving Edgar Allan Poe,” he said, “and also, I do always like for people to see that I’m an American designer.” Carrie Coon,The Gilded Age’s Bertha Russell, narrated the poem, which added an element of drama to the show that Browne’s previous outings haven’t always had, her delivery shifting as she read, from calm to quite agitated, until it edged into full-blown hysteria.The poem gave Browne his visual language for fall. A white moiré coat was boldly intarsia’d with flying black birds, and a pair of boxy jackets were graffiti’d with the raven’s catchphrase in block letters on the back. The models wore net headpieces whose profiles resemble that of the bird, and their nails were painted black and shaped into talons.But Browne took great liberties. The ravens were joined by bugs, some in the formal tailoring of the 1910s (the illustrations of Georges Goursat, aka Sem, were inspirational) that were segmented horizontally like an insect’s body, and others more sculptural with the top layers peeling off the shoulders to reveal the underlayer, as if in the process of molting. Kafka’s Gregor Samsa came to mind.
As for the roses, some quick Googling revealed that starting in the 1930s an unidentified person that the media dubbed Poe Toaster used to visit the cenotaph that marked Poe’s original grave in Baltimore, Maryland, annually on his birthday, poured himself a glass of cognac and left three roses on the monument, along with the bottle of liquor, before departing. Whether or not there’s a connection there, the roses and the ravens will be ripe for the taking ahead of the Met Gala, whose “Sleeping Beauties” theme is connected to nature.The references are less important to Browne than the process and the results, which were rather magnificent while remaining more real-world wearable than some of his other collections. “It’s really about focusing on the techniques that I used for July in Paris,” he said. Homegrown couture.
14 February 2024
Thom Browne will close New York Fashion Week with a fall 2024 show scheduled for 5 p.m. on February 14. The designer and CFDA Chairman was last on the runway in his hometown a year ago; in between then and now he presented a debut couture collection in Paris. Browne’s NYFW show—Little Prince-themed, but with a happy ending—took place on Valentine’s Day last year, too, and when he came out for his bow he presented his partner Andrew Bolton with a box of chocolates, a rare tender moment of the season.Personal connections also motivate his new women’s pre-fall collection. Like the men’s equivalent, which was released mid-December, it nods to the couple’s new home upstate, a Germantown estate built circa 1773 that’s now on the National Register of Historic Places. The simulacrum of the Georgian-Federalist manse-in-handbag-form that appears in look 14 gives a good sense of the house’s appeal for Browne—all those neat symmetries. It’s also embroidered in cheery colors on the sleeve of the black top coat in look 34.Elsewhere, the wallpaper florals of skirt suits and hacking jackets worn with matching pocketed skirts seem to allude to country living, while the glossy navy material of a down coat put a polished spin on what’s otherwise a sporty piece. The designer said it was modeled on the swimming parka he wore when he competed in school. Hector (Browne’s most popular bag) has a new friend in a raven, after Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem. Joined by red roses, the black birds also adorn tweedy gray tailoring. Multicolor plaid tweeds, the overcoat of which is tipped in the brand’s signature red, white, and blue grosgrain ribbon, are the collection’s most striking pieces.Tapping into another youthful memory, Browne designed his own version of the classic Bermuda bag, swapping the wooden handles of the popular 1980s style for faux tortoiseshell, and the cotton madras covers for leather.
5 January 2024
Thom Browne and his partner Andrew Bolton recently acquired an 18th century country pile named Teviotdale in the upper Hudson Valley. Although it appeared in a 1980 Architectural Digest spread, Teviotdale can also be viewed in this collection: To relish its Palladian proportions simply eye the bag in look 13, or focus on its facade by considering the cardigan in look 18. Teviotdale, like Hector before it, seems set to become a totemic feature of Browne’s precision-tailored American fashion landscape.The house is both an original classic (as a Georgian-era Georgian-style house) and a piece of revival design, given that Georgian architecture was a riff on Renaissance architecture, which in turn riffed on the Greco-Roman “original,” which, of course, was a synthesis. Browne, kind of similarly, has built an original classic of his own: Brownian tailoring was his invention, a distinct intervention in fashion’s timeline, yet it also echoes down the ages and across the oceans to the snobs of Savile Row and fierysartiof Italy. Or as Browne said on our call: “My classic is based on 20 years ago when I introduced that proportion that was shorter at the top and slimmer at the bottom. That is really what is classic for me.”Just as will no doubt be tastefully applied at Teviotdale, Browne established his tailored classicism through layering revelatory modernization upon bygone convention. Those pillar proportions as ever held up the roof of this collection, but beneath that core canopy Browne continued the tinkering with silhouette and fabrication that began at last summer’s couture debut in Paris. These experiments included a softer shoulder and (even) slimmer jacket shape intended to break on the top of three buttons. As per, Browne roamed way beyond his gray flannel, cashmere, and tweed metier via excursions to cricket-casual (as interestingly dislocated in the US as Georgian architecture), some fine shooting short-suits, and a severely unironic turn of WASPy embroidered animalia prep. And as is lore, Browne interjected elements of the conventionally “feminine,” both in styling and garment choice, to upend and refresh the conventionally “masculine” flavor of his tailoring base.Browne’s canonical English-made Goodyear welt brogues were a key footwear foundation, however there were also more flexible, Italianate versions of the Norwegian split-toe boot, the penny loafer, and the insulated duck boot to step into.
Apart from the Teviotdale tote, there were versions of the newly introduced Mr. and Mrs. Thom bag in classy canvas and burnished black leather. The rose and raven embroideries that climbed and swooped around the clothing and also manifested in bag form were toasts to Edgar Allan Poe, both his poetry and the ritual around his resting place. Poe lies under a gravestone that—spookily—quite strongly resembles a Mr. Thom handbag. “It’s a collection of good classic ideas,” said Browne with classic understatement.
15 December 2023
Thom Browne’s entrance into Paris haute couture couldn’t have been more dramatic. He’s hardly a stranger to the city, having shown here for years. But after we climbed the steep, creaky wooden stairs at the back of the Paris Garnier Opera house—the artists’ entrance for generations—we suddenly realized that we were actually seated on the stage. Then the curtain went up. And we gasped to see that the red and gold auditorium was entirely populated from the stalls to the gods by black and white cut-out illustrations of someone who looked very much like Thom himself. Three thousand in fact, he told us later.You had to wonder: was there to be something autobiographical in the formal introduction as a couturier he was about to make on this storied stage? Well, there was definitely a momentous sense of occasion in it for him. “It’s really special—the idea of taking almost American sportswear, the tailoring we do, and bringing it into a couture setting,” he said. “I thought it was important, even in representing American fashion.”On our seats were the tiniest scrolls, the size of fortune cookies, tied up in Thom Browne ribbon. On them were cryptically printed one half of the English proverb, “A bird in the hand…”To the strains of Visage’s “Fade to Grey,” Alek Wek walked up the aisle and onto the stage wearing—what else—a gray Thom Browne jacket and kilt. She sat on a pile of gray luggage, and things commenced around her. There were Thom Browne gray suits and coats in multitudes, all strictly narrow in silhouette, but each almost a vignette in itself.There were patchworks of small country town landscapes, and seasides with sailboats. There were elaborate brocades, Prince of Wales checks, coats and short-suits embroidered with silver and gold sequined stripes. One coat had a pattern of 3D clouds woven into it.Strange symbolic people began to come and go. Eleven characters dressed as bells, with bell-hats and enormous swollen patchworked coats and bells as spurs on their heels. Pigeon-people—one being Jordan Roth—in feathery bodysuits emerging from huge hip-level blazers.The drama took sinister turns. Bells on the soundtrack began to take on a funereal tone. A woman in extravagant black Edwardiana visited and left. And then another, in white. Ultimately, there was a visitation of someone in a white sequined coat, with a conceptual train on their head. The Thom Browne team had obviously been working overtime, too. Then finally, a bride in a white coat-dress.
3 July 2023
“In regards to my runway collections, I almost don’t design for men and women anymore. It’s more that I just design clothing that can be worn by a man or a woman. I think we live in a time when that’s very interesting to our customer.” So said Thom Browne to preface a chat about a resort 24 menswear collection that clearly closely echoed his same-seasonwomenswearreleased last week. Of course, he added, there are differences between the two gender categories in terms of fit. But all of the fabric development was done together. And a large proportion of the garments in each collection are to all intents and purposes twins, albeit with minor variations here and there.Browne said that runway instinct, now spread to pre-, first exhibited itself in spring 2018’s menswearcollection, entitled Why Not? That show featured men in perfectly sharpened pencil skirts in sartorial fabrics and stemmed from Browne’s consideration of how, as infants, we are all effectively dressed in identical garments. It is only as we “develop” that the genders become divided by the boundaries of dress code. Disregarding those divisions has allowed Browne more space to focus on other elements of clothes-making, and as he prepares for his first-ever couture show next month the most significant of these has become quality. He said: “I am putting in front of people something that is as beautifully made as possible.”Quality in clothing is challenging to assess, so in order to showcase it—and to insert a separate message of inversion and reinvention—Browne sometimes moved the interior elements of his tailoring to the exterior. Look 28 riffed on the naval sartorial tradition by using gold bullion thread to etch the contours of construction on the outside of the classic sailing club double-breasted gold-buttoned blazer. Placed above a sectioned pleated skirt and button-up cardigan both edged in Browne’s signature red, white, and blue stripe and nu-duck boots, the look was simultaneously disruptively unconventional and harmonically proportioned.Tweed, that woven kaleidoscope, makes a perfect material vehicle for Browne’s philosophy and here was developed in Look 2 into an astonishing melange combining horsehair, grosgrain, suiting fabrics, the house label, and other sub-tweeds. Elsewhere tweed was cut into scenic abstract patterns on suiting or used in panels on multi-skirted jackets and outerwear.
As ever, Browne toured the touchstones of 19th century masculine preppy dress—the itinerary this time round included collegiate jackets, cricket jumpers, and pinstripes—but on each stop added a satisfyingly unsettling twist. More evidently anarchic was the final radial stitched transparent overcoat with Browne’s hit jockstrap lurking beneath. “We’ve sold a lot of jockstraps,” he said. The Little Bo Peep bonnets and floating sheep bags pointed to the post-Hector portage of the season.
15 June 2023
Thom Browne is headed to Paris. He’ll show a couture collection for men and women on July 3, kicking off a year of activities marking the 20th anniversary of his business. Going on his past ready-to-wear shows in the City of Light, which have featured a life-size unicorn puppet andPose’s Mj Rodriguez vamping to Aretha Franklin’s “Pink Cadillac,” it’s not going to be a small production. “It’s a huge honor to be able to show during couture, and I’m taking it seriously because we are representing American fashion,” he said.For his pre-collections, he has a different agenda, though it wouldn’t be right to call these clothes more humble or more workaday than what he puts on the runway. Though suiting is Browne’s specialty, he’s no minimalist. It’s safe to say he’s actually more of a maximalist, one with a flair for layering and obsessive attention to sartorial minutiae.That came into focus here with the opening series of looks, which featured strong shoulders, short sleeves (even shorter than usual), and, in one case, an inside-out construction that exposed all the inner workings of a typical Thom Browne jacket, including the shoulder caps, the seam bindings, and the canvas lining that gives his pieces the weight he likes.He called this season “a little bit of a refresh, in regards to all the color currently going into stores.” Though he opened with black, gray, and navy, it wasn’t as strict as advertised. Some of the tweeds lavishly incorporated horsehair and his signature red-white-and-blue grosgrain ribbon into their weaves, while other more traditional versions were woven in baby blue and soft orange. A silver foil look that combined a padded down coat, tailored jacket, and long kilt was an outlier, but it wasn’t the collection’s only bit of flash. A minidress with the same strong shoulders as the tailoring (it was built off of a tuxedo construction) was hand-embroidered in panels of shiny black sequins.As for the look book’s flying sheep, Browne has such a hit on his hands with the Hector bags he’s modeled after his miniature wirehaired dachshund—he reports he sells more of them than any other kind—that he’s expanding the menagerie.
8 June 2023
It was September 2021 the last time Thom Browne showed as part of New York Fashion Week. More often than not, he’s been in Paris, but with his new position as Chairman of the CFDA, a slot on the calendar is part of the job description. He had a full house tonight at the Shed, and no expense was spared on the set. A fine layer of sand covered the floor and in the center was a crashed biplane; above it, planets and stars were suspended from the ceiling. A late arriving Erykah Badu gave the crowd time to crack wise about spy balloons, but when the show got underway and a voice came over the soundtrack reading the famous lines, “it is only with the heart one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye,” it became clear that The Little Prince was the reference point.The attraction, Browne said backstage afterwards, was “how the story says that children actually see more than adults do. That was really the separation between the more strict tailoring and the more conceptual tailoring—that the kids actually saw things more interesting. Because I like to see things like that.” Browne uses his runways for story telling—“for me the shows are pure creativity, I don’t think about the business and commerce at all,” he said—and he stuck quite close to the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry novella, which, in its way, shows how life should be lived.An aircraft pilot and a little prince stumbled around the downed plane, taking their time, the former in a quilted space suit trimmed in Browne’s signature red, white, and blue stripes, and the latter in a too-big jacket and gold knits that matched his hair. A group of models in intarsia’d silk dresses representing the six planets visited by the Little Prince prior to his meeting the pilot emerged next. In the book, each one represents a negative aspect of society, like the materialistic businessman who prefers to count and catalog the stars rather than admire their beauty.They were followed by the “adults” Browne was talking about, in strict but supersized tailoring, who themselves were followed by “kids” in deconstructed suits, shirts, and ties layered over precisely fitted sheaths. It was only at the end that Browne deviated from the script. The Little Prince, an idealistic fellow, goes missing or perhaps dies for his lost love, but the designer wanted a happy conclusion, and so Precious Lee assumed the form of an angel and rescued our hero from his melancholy.
Together they led a procession of paired-off couples to the strains of Josh Groban singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Carousel.The earnestness of the show was disarming, all the more so when Browne emerged from backstage to bring his partner Andrew Bolton a box of Valentine’s chocolates. In fashion, we’re more accustomed to irony than sincerity. We’re also used to 10-minute shows, and this one was a solid 35. If you spared Browne that indulgence and leaned into the love story, the work was undeniably extraordinary, with its lavish bouclé tweeds (a nod to Karl Lagerfeld ahead of the Met Gala, perhaps) and the imaginative ways it deconstructed and reconstructed and flipped inside out the house signature gray suiting.Something else interesting was happening here. Browne has more or less normalized the kilt for men. Any number of male celebrities have worn them on red carpets. The shaped midi-dresses he put on all genders on this runway are something different, more provocative somehow. But maybe not for long. “My eye is not seeing men and women anymore,” he said. “It’s seeing just one beautiful world.” The Little Prince would like the sound of that.
14 February 2023
“Call me Ishmael.” Along with the in-retrospect first-wave cancel culture opusThe Scarlet Letter, Moby Dickwas one of the great works of literature that emerged from the United States in the mid-19th Century. Interestingly it only became acclaimed in the century that followed, hailed as a disruptive amalgam of multiple forms of discourse ranging from the Homeric to the Shakespearean that served to recast the epic in novel form. Reading this lookbook, it hit you that Thom Browne’s disruptive amalgam of menswear’s discourses—specifically “American” ones—has been similarly transformational. Is that what drew him to Melville this season?“Gosh,” said Browne. “I feel like I’m in an English Lit class.”Well-dressed whales continue to be drawn compulsively to Browne, happily harpooned by his darkly witty skewering of the clothing canon. This season’s Melville conceit enabled the designer to return to one of his happiest hunting grounds, old school East Coast US prep. After observing how closely related Melville’s text was to Nantucket, Browne said: “I think the whole Wasp-y idea, the quintessential notion of preppy, came from this part of New England and some items in this collection really play into that.”Hence the handsome duckboots and Weejun-esque moccasin boots, the boating blazers and the whale or yacht embroidered chinos. Patchworked Franken-suiting and skirts echoed prep-staple mashed madras shirting. There were some sneakers, more Ivy League than prep, that recalled the earliest types of the form.Other discourses navigated included plaid tweeds and woolens fashioned into twinsets and pencil skirts as well as nautically-touched tailoring, which like everything here was reflected in the accompanyingwomenswearcollection. Noted their author: “Between the men’s and the women’s I love using the same. And making peoples’ eyes see that they work for both a man and a woman.” Balancing those checks, Browne’s home harbor remained tailoring, proper and precise and mostly shrunken slightly in proportion, applied across the genders regardless of the convention of pant versus skirt. Pioneering footwear here included a knit sneaker disguised as a brogue.Especially intriguing—along with the hidden Hector mermaids in the season’s toile de jouy-esque prints and intarsias—were the gentle venturings towards workwear in corduroy patch pocket outerwear and a handsome hickory-meets-pinstripe two-piece with an uncharacteristic deep-pleated pant shape.
Ostensibly more Protestant and sober than his recent Cinderella installment, this Browne collection swept you in nonetheless.
16 December 2022
How do you follow up an Opera Garnier extravaganza that opened with Gwendoline Christie in a braided coat and closed with MJ Rodriguez in a button-down and tie, boy briefs peeking over the waistband of her trousers, strutting not just to Aretha Franklin’s “Pink Cadillac,” butina pink cadillac? If you’re Thom Browne you do an about-face, and swapCinderella, which was one of his reference points for spring, withMoby Dick.At first glance, this pre-fall collection has a much more sober spirit than spring, with its shades of navy and gray, and its more typically Browneian silhouettes. Of course, the Herman Melville classic is a tale of obsession and revenge, but look closer at these clothes—Browne’s clothes typically reward close inspection—and you’ll find humor in them too. See the intarsia’d double-breasted coat in which a lifeboat full of sailors is dwarfed by the giant sperm whale, or the tailored skirt suit in a wallpaper print depicting the final battle at sea between Captain Ahab and Moby Dick. On the accessories front, Hector the bag has made some new friends in the form of not just the victorious whale, but also the Pequod, the doomed ship.About this season’s silhouettes. Though there’s a’60s-short shift or two, Browne’s instinct was to cut his tailoring lean and long, often layering pants underneath skirt shapes to extend the line. Accessorizing the tweed separates with tweed tights created a similar elongating effect. The remarkable thing about Browne is that his aesthetic is so well-sketched out, so unique, that both the Cinderella and Moby Dick collections could only be designed by him.
8 December 2022
A while back, while in Paris, Thom Browne caught a version of the Cinderella story at the magnificent gilded folly that is the Opéra Garnier. I suspect it wasCendrillonby Jules Massenet. This afternoon Browne returned to Napoleon III’s most magnificently OTT architectural memento to present a production of his own, what he called “an American prom mixed with Cinderella mixed with the Paris Opera.”Just in case we didn’t know what to expect, Gwendoline Christie provided disambiguation. She emerged in a full-length, single-breasted, white-piped, braided blazer—double vented—and some marvelous golden sandals with little effigies of Browne’s dachshund, Hector (who got lots of walkies this season), at the front of each foot. After a slow mosey around the golden halls, she returned to ours and began spritzing herself with cologne and brushing her locks. And then she told us of what was to come: “Thom loves his little stories—and this is going to be avery longstory.”We settled into our golden chairs. And the story went a little bit like this. Four rouge-lipped hot boys came and removed Christie’s dressing table, wearing quintessential Browne gray tailoring and kilts: salarymen at a Scottish reel. Then came 20 opera coats—the first in a tricolored arrangement—with collegiate numbers on each back: I noted every number. The came five frock coats and three swing skirts with petticoats, plus one white witch extra. And then all 20 coat wearers returned with their unders revealed: all polka-dot tailoring and pastels and peekaboo underwear. As a Brit, it was impossible not to see the tradition of pantomime—but was this a projection?The best section by far ran 52 to 56, when the punks invaded the assembly. Vivienne Westwood was an unavoidable comparison, but it was convincingly great (as was Joan Jett on the PA) unto itself.
3 October 2022
Marisa Berenson came running into Thom Browne’s spring 2023 menswear show. Farida Khelfa followed and Sasha Pivavorova emerged last, rushing to get to her front row seat. The women wore fantastical suits from Browne’s resort 2023 collection, a small preview of what is being released today, almost a month after Browne’s sexily tweeded guys hit the catwalk. “I knew the collections were connected,” Browne said on a video preview, “but I didn’t realize how well it was going to work.”The women had the kind of bravado required to pull off a mannish floral jacquard blazer or a pastel color-blocked midi skirt suit. “They are women who have lived interesting lives,” Browne said of his muses, who also include artist Anh Duong and photographer Cate Underwood. “Accomplished, strong, and iconic in their own way.”That’s the Browne promise: Even for those of us who live the most normal of existences, his clothes offer the opportunity to feel extraordinary and unique. There’s no way to slip into a white suit embroidered with children’s storybook scenes and not experience an almost instant mood lift or to pack your things into a giant sunflower backpack and not smile. This season, Browne has supersized some of his proportions and continues to play with pleated skirts, allowing his sometimes strict vision to attract people with different body types and ways of life.Still, the classics are always Browne’s—and his customers’—favorites. “It’s true to what I did 20 years ago and it still feels so new and strong,” he said. “It shows there is still a way for us to go forward.” Going forward, trying new things, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible in fashion—well, that’s just the Thom Browne way. It’s no wonder that many are drawn to his unconventional approach. “The love you see in these pictures,” he said, “was free.”
22 July 2022
In 2017, Thom Browne expanded his oeuvre and put men in dresses during his menswear show in Paris. That collection, called “Why Not?” was less a provocation than a flex: The elegant elongated shapes Browne was developing for women translated, seamlessly and cheekily, for men. Five years later—and after a two-year hiatus from Paris—Browne’s menswear is back in the French capital with similar potency. His spring 2023 collection, suspended almost entirely from jock straps, is Browne’s updated meditation on “how far you can push it?”“I thought the dresses were too much back then,” Browne began at a preview in his showroom, “but now feels like the time to do this. It’s about how much guys can look at and entertain.” Referring to the many visible cheeks on the catwalk, he pointedly added: “It’s not about shock value.”If not shock, then what? There has been a lot of nudity this menswear season and in the past two years in general, but Browne’s stated intent is less about showing flesh than it is about finding a new form for men. You can see how he could get bored quick. This is his third catwalk in under a year—plus four pre-collections. “I have a good team” he demurred when asked how he creates with such voracity.So the brief was brief this season: short, mini, kinky, gorgeous. Each of the looks was made in a unique French tweed, from the same maker of you-know-who’s tweeds, inspired by the couture ideology of the 1940s and 1950s. The show began with friends of the maison as couture clients—Anh Duong, Marisa Berenson, Farida Khelfa, and more—bolting in to the second floor of the Crillon to find their seats. From their vantage point they could ogle the guys—a nice swap—in their shorter-in-the-back kiltlets, sailor tops, cropped organza button downs, and luxurious tweed coats with gold bouillon. As with any Browne outing, the fabrics and silhouettes were as fine as can be.After a mostly underwhelming season, at least according to the menswear editors I tallied, how far could this irreverent beauty really go, though? Several balked. Others chuckled. When a dancer emerged at the end of the show dressed in a codpiece with an anchor Prince Albert piercing, I exchanged a glance with a friend across the aisle and we both giggled. Last night was Pride in Paris. In Browne’s beloved USA, human rights are being revoked by the hour.
It would be hard to picture a more gay and proud couture-worthy collection: the sailor, the cowboy, the surfer, the tennis pro; the stereotypes divorced from expected connotations, made in the artisanal gold standard of womenswear design, ass cracks gleaming and pert under those red, white and blue bars of gingham. Browne is gay and proud. Will his cis-het clientele be radicalized or scandalized? A voiceover that started the show spoke about the couture process of the ’50s, when women were swans and men were their benefactors. “Men have the very great pleasure of paying,” said the recording. Time to pay up, boys.
26 June 2022
At his fall 2022 runway show—scheduled for today to better couple with his partner Andrew Bolton’s “In America: An Anthology of Fashion” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute—Thom Browne presented a concise, unwavering narrative: This collection is about New York as “an island of misfit toys” and the way people come to the city “to find themselves and to create themselves,” he said. The first 24 looks were “realistic” versions of Browne’s tailoring, the second 24 were their “conceptual” partners, plumped up and wacky-fied to express the individuality and authenticity of self-expression. It was presented as a Ted Talk—cue the pun—led by model Rocky Harwell dressed as a Thom Browne teddy bear to an audience of stuffed teddies in little Thom Browne suits. The human guests framed the perimeter.Watch a video of the show and the message will read loud and clear: We are all weirdos who can present as passable normies, letting our creativity fester beneath the surface. Bringing one’s authentic self to the party and being accepted as that authentic version of one’s self is good. “It’s so nice when you find your true self and you stay true to that,” Browne said before the show. You can see why the idea would appeal: Over the course of his near-20 year career he has had to justify time and again that his succinct, extreme vision is worth caring about. Even today, as guests trickled out, many balked at something so bizarre and kooky happening on a Friday night in New York. To which I must say: Maybe you should get out more. It’s ironic, too, that for all his specificity, he is out-earning the vast majority of brands that present runway shows in America, clocking $263 million in revenue in 2021. Proof that being your authentic self really pays off.Browne’s authentic self is always about the gray wool suit. For fall, he has created his New York-iest version yet, letting a little air in via boxy long jackets with repp stripe piping, straight leg cuffed trousers, and voluminous pleated skirts. Compare them to the miniscule corsets and teensy suits some guests wore in the front row, and see that these are some of his most freeing shapes—and were it not for the high platforms on models’ feet they could have sprinted down the runway like they were running to catch the J train. With clashing schoolhouse colors fanning out in the pleats of a skirt and mis-matched socks, it qualified as cute.
29 April 2022
To the untrained eye, a lot of Thom Browne’s work looks the same. Gray wool suit, pleated skirt, rakish tie, et cetera, but as the designer discussed his pre-fall 2022 womenswear on Zoom the truth became apparent: Browne rarely does the same thing twice. Sure, he has a very stable gray wool core, but each season he delights in trying out an outrageous new silhouette, a clever in-joke, or a cheeky rethink of an American staple.While this women’s collection carries over motifs from Browne’s men’s pre-fall, including lovely jade floral intarsias inspired by his bedroom wallpaper and a fixation with lobsters resulting in an exceptional Shetland wool lobster skirt—he introduced new whimsical proportions here. A cropped puffer was so short and bulbous it almost looked like a mushroom cap atop slender black trousers. Browne has never made a womenswear silhouette that exaggerates the upper body in this abbreviated way before. Elswhere, khaki shorts do the opposite for a woman’s lower half; they’re cut wide, loose, and sexless enough to look dementedly funny. The signature Browne suit has evolved, as well: The shoulderpads and the canvas are cut out of the brand’s cropped blazer so that it’s as soft and snuggly as a cardigan, constructed from an elegant black-and-white tweed.There’s also a wolf in sheep’s clothing—not literally, though that’s something we might expect from Browne. The check gray skirt suit in look 28 might seem standard, but look closer and Browne is doing something strangely new: Here is a single-breasted blazer with a vest long enough to be worn as a dress and a loose, almost shapeless skirt. For a designer with famously strict tailoring—one customer once told me that to sit down he had to undo the top notch of his trousers—silhouettes that skim the body and waft in the breeze are practically revelatory. Browne says the suit is “the most important look” of the collection, unlocking an idea that will carry to the silhouettes we’ll see in his fall 2022 outing.
12 January 2022
The obvious headline of Thom Browne’s pre-fall 2022 menswear collection would be “Lashes and Lobsters.” Models sport inches-long falsies and tote leather lobster bags and backpacks in a display that is so provocatively Surrealist it recalls Elsa Schiaparelli’s daring 1937 dress with a crustacean across the crotch. Browne’s version relies less on the obvious pun of that exoskeletal creature—he says the lobster is just the latest of the animals he has welcomed into his zoo—and more an examination of the beauty of skirting on men.It’s a continuation of ideas he started nearly 20 years ago but have taken hold of late, with Pete Davidson, Dan Levy, and Lee Pace wearing Browne’s skirts on the red carpet. Business for mid-shin, pleated skirts is booming, Browne reported over Zoom.This season he’s constructed half-pleated, half-straight versions of his classic kilt, worn with “one-and-a-half”–breasted blazers with self-tipped seams and covered buttons. Modular dresses in melton wool carry over from the spring 2022 collection, now in warm dove gray and mossy celadon. A selection of slim, sexy black-tie options, from midi-skirts to short suits, close out the collection.Saving the best for last, there are also jade green floral intarsias. Those of us who have followed Browne for the past two decades may think that he’s tapped all his personal references—the runner, the Olympian, the Catholic school boy—but a wise designer always leaves himself room for more. Just before the pandemic hit, Browne and his partner, Andrew Bolton, purchased a new home in Manhattan, which they spent two years renovating. This fall they finally moved in, and their central aesthetic compromise was the hand-painted jade green floral wallpaper above their bed. The same flowers are cut in furs and wools, winding up on overcoats and embroidered into jackets. “I don’t think I’ve ever done anything as personal,” said Browne as his dog, Hector, nestled into his lap. The couple’s home, he says, will be off-limits to design mags, but this simple shared gesture is open to everyone to try on and try out. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that who you spend your life with matters. I can’t say a Thom Browne suit will find you love, but in the TB family, there is always kinship and kilts.
10 December 2021
Thom Browne is the master of the grand gesture. At his spring 2022 presentation, the audience could be carried off in awe in so many directions: Pegasuses rode penny-farthings, a couple of bachelors haunted a raw wood house, models turned from shrubs into statues—and that’s just what happened on the runway. In the front row was just about every relevant artist, author, and athlete, from LilHuddy to Russell Westbrook to Jeremy O. Harris to Dan Levy to the star of Browne’s fall 2021 collection, Lindsey Vonn. Everyone was in TB, everyone looked smart, elated, and happy to take in a show.What was great about seeing Browne back in action in three dimensions was being able to see the small gestures, too. Those rainbow-color tulle dresses that made up the finale, with trompe l’oeil drapery and abs, were not painted, but dozens of layers of tulle built up like a topography of the human form. Teddy Quinlivan’s long sheath had an arm sewn to the torso, and the models who walked in the show’s first passage were layered in at least four Browne tailoring separates. This show was not only awesome for its theatricality but for its scale; other designers would struggle to make a single garment to Browne’s standard. Browne made about 200.Each of those 200 shirts, pants, skirts, suits, jackets, bags, shoes, and hand-made gray flowers was, in not-so-coded language, a love letter to American fashion. Browne moved his show back to New York for one season only in support of his partner Andrew Bolton’s exhibition “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” opening at The Met this week.The presentation began with a voice-over about a couple of bachelors stuck indoors, looking out over an aging garden. Classic statuary, the tradition of carving a marble block into a contrapposto David, charted the show’s three parts: part one, twenty Platonic suiting ideals; part two, the pure marble slab as tunic and maxi, fastened with a hook-and-eye up the back; part three, a trick of the eye, a flex of artistry, full force in tulle. The exact Greek statues Browne visited were in The Met, and the sense of pride, honor, and craft in this show—and the reverence for Bolton’s artful curation—was beyond evident. At the end, the show’s two bachelors chained their gates, unzipped each other’s gray wool dresses, and orbited each other, never quite touching hands. Passion thrives in the littlest gestures; Browne’s show was full of beauty to pluck your heartstrings and stoke your sartorial flame.
12 September 2021
Thom Browne’s latest epic was a two-parter: the performance at Pitti Uomo in Florence in January, then the collection in the showroom, which was not catwalked. “Too bad, the show is one thing I really like to do,” Browne said regretfully. But without the live element, he felt no compunction to create any of his elaborate, often ludicrous show-pieces, "eye-rollers” as he called them, and that was a good thing. “This is the most pulled-back collection I’ve done,” he claimed (though, at the time, we were standing by a shorts suit in a snowflake-skier-and-bunny-rabbit Fair Isle with matching kneesocks, so it pays to keep the context of his statement in mind). Discipline was the key word, in almost every way. In his immaculately choreographed Pitti presentation, Browne aired his proclivity for fetishistic uniformity to such spectacular effect that you might wonder what there was left to say, but he expanded on the theme of uniforms for the actual collection. The key silhouette—a jacket with a stiff flaring skirt, the trousers underneath given a jodhpur proportion—would have looked right to a Prussian officer, even in gray cashmere. Browne saw his rugby stripes as a sports uniform, and his union suit as a worker's uniform (or, at least, a worker’s under-uniform). He showed it sleeveless, in cashmere or plaid, with a little matching jacket, astrakhan-trimmed, over the top. “I like such a utilitarian idea in such a rich fabric,” was his typically artless rationale for such an oddity.Given that Browne has turned sacrilege into a sartorial art (why on earth would anyone want to turn lush cashmere into a rubbery-feeling waterproof?), it was reassuring that his own favorite piece in the collection was just about the plainest: a fur-collared navy topcoat. Just as straightforward were an Eisenhower jacket and coat, and some appealingly pretty jacquards that looked like Japanese paper patterns. So we've got to give the guy his eye-roller. It came in the form of a floor-length officer's coat with flap-pockets tumbling down its back. “Practical,” insisted Browne. “It’s a backpack.” But all I could think of was the candy wrappers and cigarette butts that unenlightened souls might seek to unload while the wearer was otherwise engaged.This review was originally published onmen.style.comon February 18, 2009. It has been added to Vogue Runway in June 2021 as a part ofThe Lost Season.
11 June 2021
I hate to start with a proverb, but after a resort-themed conversation with Thom Browne, I can’t knock the saying “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink” from my head. That idea seems to relate to a lot of what Browne makes: You can show people his suits and shrunken dresses, but you can’t turn them into believers until they slip a thigh into a short suit to understand just how fun and freeing Browne’s garments are. Once they do, the Browne universe is their oyster, though the designer has his own proverb of sorts for it: “I’m asking people to come to the edge of the pool and dive in however they want to.”Diving into his women’s resort collection provides endless opportunities to make it one’s own. The cropped and provocative “belly shirts” and skintight trousers of his men’s resort lineup give way to a madly layered proposition for women: skirts over pants, dresses over oxford shirts, blazers over cardigans over corsets over shirts. Everything is topped off with a hat, a Hector Browne bag, a kite envelope clutch, and a pair of Browne’s signature four-stripe socks. The childlike spirit of wonder and possibility central to the collection, represented through cloud and aviation motifs, puts the wearer in the driver’s seat, able to choose her own quirky or posh Browne stylings. (Still, Browne “strongly suggests” you try the skirt over pants.)Within this densely populated array of merchandise, you’ll find some new ideas too. An A-line minidress, not unheard of but rare in Browne’s oeuvre, was inspired by a pre-pandemic dinner in Paris. “A good friend walked into a restaurant in an insanely short dress, and everybody turned and looked,” Browne recalled. Whether you layer it over pants, another skirt, or just some patterned tights, the A-line number is the kind of thing that could turn even the most ardent punk into a Browne-style prep.
2 June 2021
For his men’s resort offering, Thom Browne presents a relaxed counter to the couture craft and corsetry he showed for fall 2021. “I wanted to make a collection that feels very childlike and playful, coming off such a dressed-up and very serious collection,” he says. Symbols from Browne’s youth like kites and propeller planes—toys, he explains, that his parents gave him and his siblings to encourage the idea that anything was possible—are appliqued and intarsia’d into his signature gray wool suits. A recurring bag shape made in the likeness of his dachshund, Hector, has been elongated into a streamliner jet. Pleated kilts, shrunken suits, and round-shoulder jackets with exposed shoulder pads are ideas that carry over from past collections, now paired with nautical sailor caps and ponchos—the first Browne has ever designed. A cotton knit version is at least the size of a tapestry; it took a team of knitters weeks to engineer and make.Such whimsically constructed pieces are signature Browne. More unexpected are freaky bits of mischief like a trio of gray madras looks composed of “obnoxious” miniskirts layered over kinky trousers—totally skintight and totally without stretch. There’s also a “belly shirt,” as Browne calls it, worn with a revealing suit sure to provoke those with puritanical ideas of gendered dress.“Over the last 20 years, the collections have evolved, but they haven’t changed,” says Browne. That mix of classicism and surprise speaks to the strength of Browne’s freewheeling-but-strong aesthetic: Anything can be Browne’d, from belly shirts to Bermuda shorts to Bonnie Cashin–ish ponchos.
26 May 2021
“If you’re going to do it, you might as welldo it,” says Thom Browne with a little bite. “What’s the point otherwise?” For fall 2021 Browne has thrown down the gauntlet, not only doing it, but going for it. His men’s and women’s collections are an outrageous flexing of his prowess, garments made on such an extreme scale they’re almost overwhelming to look at, let alone think about wearing. There is not a shred of coziness, comfort, or relaxation here. If anything, Browne’s silhouettes have become stricter, more confining, more formal.His starting points are always deceptively simple, like fusing black-tie clothing with sport apparel. Fall continued themes Browne began toying with for spring 2021: the Olympics, monochrome, athleticism under the guise of formalism. But rather than relax a silhouette as he did with his Deco-looking spring line, here he cinched and corseted, fanned out skirts, and shrunk jackets to little shrugs layered over voluminous wool piqué and flannel shirtdresses. A ball skirt that looks like layered puffers took more than 100 pattern pieces to make. A pleated trench coat required 209 patterns.The most mind-boggling pieces are made of curved plissé, inspired, Browne says, by the lines ice-skaters make on the rink and those that slalom skiers do as they race down the mountain, as Lindsey Vonn does in Browne’s dreamlike Fashion Week film. Of a gigantic white bow slung around a low corseted waist, Browne repeats his refrain: “If you’re going to do a couture bow,doa couture bow.” Underneath those bubble helmets and big-time bows are models of all genders, but Browne insists gender really doesn’t matter. He’s making beautiful clothes for everyone.That sounds honorably egalitarian, but of course you must wonder: Who on earth is going to wear this? To that Browne delivers his rebuttal forcefully: “You don’t have a business if you don’t have the creativity to create the business.” The Browne business is estimated at $500 million. “The point is to create a world that is interesting; that world will make that classic jacket interesting.” His go-big-or-go-home mentality not only works—it’s a slap in the face to the pandemic-pivot, cozy-core crowd. As a spectator to the Fashion Designer Olympics, I’ll be honest, it’s pretty riveting to watch Browne challenge and prod his peers, making grand gestures and finding success because of it.
He has some good challengers: Tom Ford, Rick Owens, and Browne alum Daniel Roseberry, each a patternmaker with a showman’s panache. Will another worthy challenger summit the mountain and try to strip these guys of their gold medals?
7 March 2021
“If you’re going to do it, you might as welldo it,” says Thom Browne with a little bite. “What’s the point otherwise?” For fall 2021 Browne has thrown down the gauntlet, not only doing it, but going for it. His men’s and women’s collections are an outrageous flexing of his prowess, garments made on such an extreme scale they’re almost overwhelming to look at, let alone think about wearing. There is not a shred of coziness, comfort, or relaxation here. If anything, Browne’s silhouettes have become stricter, more confining, more formal.His starting points are always deceptively simple, like fusing black-tie clothing with sport apparel. Fall continued themes Browne began toying with for spring 2021: the Olympics, monochrome, athleticism under the guise of formalism. But rather than relax a silhouette as he did with his Deco-looking spring line, here he cinched and corseted, fanned out skirts, and shrunk jackets to little shrugs layered over voluminous wool piqué and flannel shirtdresses. A ball skirt that looks like layered puffers took more than 100 pattern pieces to make. A pleated trench coat required 209 patterns.The most mind-boggling pieces are made of curved plissé, inspired, Browne says, by the lines ice-skaters make on the rink and those that slalom skiers do as they race down the mountain, as Lindsey Vonn does in Browne’s dreamlike Fashion Week film. Of a gigantic white bow slung around a low corseted waist, Browne repeats his refrain: “If you’re going to do a couture bow,doa couture bow.” Underneath those bubble helmets and big-time bows are models of all genders, but Browne insists gender really doesn’t matter. He’s making beautiful clothes for everyone.That sounds honorably egalitarian, but of course you must wonder: Who on earth is going to wear this? To that Browne delivers his rebuttal forcefully: “You don’t have a business if you don’t have the creativity to create the business.” The Browne business is estimated at $500 million. “The point is to create a world that is interesting; that world will make that classic jacket interesting.” His go-big-or-go-home mentality not only works—it’s a slap in the face to the pandemic-pivot, cozy-core crowd. As a spectator to the Fashion Designer Olympics, I’ll be honest, it’s pretty riveting to watch Browne challenge and prod his peers, making grand gestures and finding success because of it.
He has some good challengers: Tom Ford, Rick Owens, and Browne alum Daniel Roseberry, each a patternmaker with a showman’s panache. Will another worthy challenger summit the mountain and try to strip these guys of their gold medals?
7 March 2021
“It almost workstoowell,” says Thom Browne with a devilish smile about his new way of working both in-person and remotely during the pandemic. The proof is in his ability to have produced succinct, timely, and impeccably made clothing three times so far since the lockdowns began, never missing a deadline or show date. In December 2020, he released pre-fall for men, today he’s revealing women’s pre-fall, and next week he will unveil a new project at Paris’s Men’s Fashion Week, followed by a fall 2021 co-gender collection in February.One imagines the Thom Browne studio in overdrive, brimming with animal intarsias, rep stripe corsetry, and pom-pom stocking hats, tailors and patternmakers stitching and cutting furiously. Somehow, though, everyone seems calm and in order. The benefit of having a decisive captain at the helm, perhaps.There’s advantages, too, in working with such consistent themes. The women’s pre-fall collection carries over the central ideas of Browne’s pre-fall menswear: the crisp Americanness of scout uniforms, salmon and bear motifs, and a versatile pleated and corseted shape. There are many one-to-one analogues between the collections: the elegant pleated trenchcoats, the rubber-sole duck boots, the corseted waist and kilt skirt as a central silhouette. “In general I like to think about traditional pieces of clothing,” Browne says. Of course, he adds his own spice of subversion to staid items like Norfolk jackets and black tie tuxes.Applying the same traditions to men and women produces different results, though. On men, a skirt is still provocative and a corset even more so. On women, the look reads preppy but twisted—without much shock factor. That’s not to say Browne relies on provocation to keep things interesting, but it does put into question the larger purpose of gendered collections. Browne’s main seasons are combined in a single presentation so seamlessly it’s curious why ideas are divvied up here.That said, there are some new surprises for ladies, including a daffodil embroidered jacket with three-dimensional tufts of thread wafting across its front, as though the wearer had just made a wish. “For when you can’t go outside,” he smiles. That sense of whimsy is what has kept each collection—men’s, women’s, unisex, running, who knows what’s next!—exciting amidst the doldrums of pandemic life.
19 January 2021
In this year of questioning and chaos, few qualities are as inspiring in a leader as certainty and trustworthiness. (Americans feel this especially, coming off four years of hard pivots and lies.) Who in American fashion is more certain, more worthy of your trust, than Thom Browne? He is a perfectionist, an Olympian of tailoring—and as a follower or customer, you can trust that each season will come with red stripes and blue ones, gray suits and navy ones, a bit of sport, a bit of subversion, and a playful two-strap bag in the shape of his beloved pup, Hector. Browne’s most appealing quality in this topsy-turvy time is that he does not reinvent the wheel each season; he offers consistency with a sprinkle of new delights. No wonder his sales have been holding steady amid a global slump.Zooming in from his gray office, wearing his gray suit, on quite a gray New York day, Browne said that his mid-season collections are both a pure expression of his creativity and a time to really focus on product. Every look is designed top hat to tailcoat, and the 30 on view here each tell their own stories about Browne’s career-spanning interests. The opening pair of looks carries on the designer’s work of translating womenswear to menswear with Shetland plaids and American rep stripes cut into grosgrain-tipped coats, jackets, corsets, and pleated skirts. (Long before Harry Styles stepped into a dress, Browne and his cult were baring calves in these flattering kilts. In fact, sales of skirts for dudes are up.)The rest of the collection plays against two motifs. One is the story of a bear family hunting for salmon before a long hibernation that is represented in masterful intarsias, hand-drawn toiles, and leather bags. At the end of this fable, Browne notes, the bears do not eat the fish—instead they live in harmony while a rabbit family watches on. The other narrative is about the joyful movement of pleats, best expressed in a pleated trench in army green and the many skirts on display. The pleats are a continuation of the long Deco lines of Browne’s spring 2021 outing, just given a touch more volume for hot midsummer days.There is a condensed third story about athleticism as well: Suits are cut in football mesh, offering a strange sportiness—maybe sexiness?—to the strictness of the tailoring.
As much as Browne can layer on pieces, so can his muses strip them off: Moses Sumney appeared shirtless in a brand video this summer; Kristen Stewart prefers to wear Thom Browne with only a lacy bra. These looks are, in the end, just a suggestion of how to feel certain in your own clothes. That’s where the trust comes in; Browne has such a potent vision, it can seem impermeable, but he trusts you to give it a new life.
21 December 2020
Thom Browne’s “first and only” family trip growing up was to the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. He would have been 11 years old at the time, but he remembers Caitlyn Jenner winning the gold medal in the decathlon and Nadia Comaneci scoring the first perfect 10 in gymnastics. It doesn’t take a lot of mental gymnastics to understand the imprint that these moments of athletic perfection must have left on Browne. Yes, there are the many references to sports in his clothing, but there is also the fact that fastening oneself into his suits requires the mental focus—and often the attenuated calf muscles—of an athlete.For spring 2021 Browne has gone sporting at the 2132 Olympics, an event he imagines happening 239,000 miles from Earth on the moon. In a wry video he wrote that accompanies the collection, comedian Jordan Firstman and model Grace Mahary banter like sports commentators as models and flag bearers descend the stadium steps of the Los Angeles Coliseum. (The video is as wacky as any live Browne performance: transfixing, imaginative, maybe a little long.) The venue was chosen both for its Art Deco architecture and its hosting of the 1932 Olympics. The silhouettes of the ’20s and ’30s inform the clothing, from the drop-waist dresses to the slim skirts, some pleated, others as straight as your back must be to pull them off.The entire collection is rendered in shades of white: ivory, eggshell, the palest yellow, the faintest gray. Browne chose the color as a symbol of hopefulness. Here it’s hard to divorce his creativity from that of his partner, Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Andrew Bolton. (They have, after all, spent about four to five months working from home together with their dog, Hector, who receives his own tribute as a handbag and as a spaceship in the film.) The Met’s Costume Institute exhibition “About Time: Fashion and Duration,” opening on October 29 because of COVID-19 delays, features only black clothes save its closing look: a white Viktor & Rolf upcycled couture dress, a gesture of stepping into a new, hopeful future.
4 October 2020
While rain clouds gathered over Paris, the forecast called for snow at Thom Browne this afternoon. His runway was covered with heaps of the artificial kind at least, prompting a minor Instagram storm as guests arrived on the scene. Ultimately, the winter wonderland proved to be a bit of a red herring: with a giraffe mask on his head and hoof-like platform ankle boots on his feet, the first model who emerged from backstage was clearly totally out of his element. As more models came out two by two, it wasn’t hard to guess the overall theme for the collection: Noah’s Ark.References to the apocalypse have been all over Paris Fashion Week, reaching peak dystopia this morning at Balenciaga with a runway flooded with water and illuminated with fiery video projections. Against the backdrop of climate change and the escalating coronavirus crisis, scenes like these feel eerily prescient.Browne’s biblical-inspired narrative was altogether more tame in comparison and makes sense in the outsized world of his imagination. The designer has long posited fashion as escapism, and the idea of sailing off into the unknown with a boatload of well-dressed creatures might be his ultimate flight of fancy.Where Browne usually presents his men’s and women’s separately, he combined the two today. With models swishing through the fake snow in pairs—one male, one female—wearing twinning looks, the effect was twice as impactful. The flannel suit has been the linchpin of the brand since its inception, and today the designer twisted and turned the conventional look in every direction imaginable. After last season’s ode to the lavish life and style of Marie Antoinette, the new focus on luxurious tailoring felt more in step with the moment.Midi-length box pleated tweed skirts and cropped trousers seemed grounded in the real world, regardless of gender. Aside from one skin-baring halter-neck top reconstructed from a pair of gray woolen trousers, the outerwear was the most attention-grabbing element of the collection. Some of the most intricate coats came embedded with Browne’s deliciously dark sense of humor. One Prince of Wales check cape was draped with the cutout of a male figure across the shoulder; another had an embellished stuffed snake at the neck where you would usually expect a fox-fur stole. If you looked closely at the natural landscape appliqué across the back of one overcoat, you’d find a man drowning in a lake amid the monkeys and lions.
At the end of the show, Browne sent his models out for a final lap—this time the couples were same-sex and held hands. With identical lace-up booties and lace trimmed handkerchiefs pulled over their eyes however, it was almost impossible to tell the men and women apart. And that was clearly Browne’s point. Whatever the future, it’s clear that those long-held gender norms in fashion are rapidly becoming extinct.
1 March 2020
Take a pinch ofAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland(“Eat Me”). Add just a dashAnimal Farm(Stephen Jones’s pig mask was especially intense) and maybe a soupçon ofEyes Wide Shut. Scatter as seasoning into a significant mixture of Thom Browne.Et voila!Browne will present a coed runway show in Paris during womenswear week shortly. So to change things up a bit, for the first season since he started presenting shows (with menswear, of course) Browne stepped off the schedule and presented his collection via appointment instead. This meant a visit to his Paris studio on Avenue Montaigne, some dense but lower pressure conversation than is usually available post-show, some cake, and these “twisted and surreal” pictures.To be clear, the collection shown alongside women’s will be “a totally different experience.” Here, said Browne, he had wanted “to tell a beautiful story of the animals coming together and celebrating, and celebrating by eating the Thom Browne man.” This story, he expanded po-faced (Browne would make a great poker player) stemmed from “his love and appreciation for the animals” and a desire to see them turn the tables on their rapacious human overlords. There was, he said, no metaphor and no subtext, just a desire to “make some really beautiful images.” Yeah, right.To conjure them he, his team, and his cast had gathered the day before in the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild with a beautiful old car hired for the occasion from a gentleman in Normandy. Stephen Jones made masks, fashioned from wool over papier-mâché, each emanating distinct personalities. The host, a Mr. Giraffe, was a flirt. Mr. Lion had dilated scarlet pupils; he was wild. Mr. Pig had a fixed, fierce stare: enraged. Mr. Rhino was grumpily endearing. Mr. Elephant was comfortable in his skin: happy. And so on. (At the invitation of Browne, I tried on Mr. Lion, it feltgrrrr.)The focal point of their animal debauch had been baked by a specialist in Belgium, Browne said. It was a vanilla-flavored layer cake dyed tricolor, and quite beautifully iced (especially the stitching on the cuffs). Although half-eaten it was now back in the studio, holding up nicely, and extremely sweet. As an aside Browne revealed himself to be a committed fan of the British baking show, as you call it, and lamented its latter lack of Mary Berry. For her to return, we agreed would be icing.It was lovely to go through the rails with Browne and dig into his clothes along with his cake.
He name-checked some of his favorite long-term suppliers—Harris Tweed, Corgi, Bonner, Golden Bear, Sanders—from which he sources the ingredients for his own classic-with-a-(twisted)-twist menswear recipes. Favorite pieces for me blended traditional fabrics with a more deconstructed sports-sourced shape: Particularly tasty was a streamlined poacher’s jacket that mixed houndstooth and Prince of Wales and a red-checked bomber. There was also a play of windowpane check over bluish Prince of Wales check in topcoats, skirts, and jackets. The tattered hems on some similarly patterned pieces brought bouclé and womenswear to mind.Accessories included some sporty new striped down-filled bags and a new shoe featuring a leather upper insulated by a wing tip– shaped section of galvanized rubber: Totally waterproof, Browne said. Personally as someone who is used to watching Browne’s clothes perform rather than ever seeing myself inhabiting them, this one-off showroom experience brought home (in a way his shows rarely do) that once you strip down the theatrics and rationalize the silhouette, the offer is very appetizing indeed.
17 January 2020
For both his men’s and women’s Spring 2020 collections, Thom Browne nodded to the decadent stylings of Marie Antoinette at Versailles. In September, he debuted his first fragrance collection, six scents designed for men and women. In the previous and current pre-collections, his-and-hers looks have been paired up and are almost interchangeable.So it should come as no surprise that Browne will present his mens- and womenswear as a combined runway show during Paris Fashion Week in March. From his gleaming gray Avenue Montaigne showroom, he noted how the “connection” has become stronger and stronger to the point of inevitability. Strip away the conceptual theatrics that make his shows so fascinating, and Browne notes that you arrive at a jacket, trouser, and coat that are tailored identically—whether his recurring, classic “sack suit” or the new silhouette that appears here. Among the distinguishing features: an ultra-high waist held up by suspenders, pleats so sharp they draw shadows, and shoulders shaped with the gentlest slope. It’s a rakish statement, to be sure, and Browne at his gender-blurring best. “I love the sensibility of it being so beautifully masculine; but on a girl, I think there’s something beautifully feminine about it too,” he said. Look no further than the black tuxedo, arguably his most seductive look of all.For a more pronounced feminine attitude, there were fluid, dropped-waist silk shirtdresses, pleated skirts, and softly constructed coats that took cues from the 1920s (the news that he had purchased a 15-room Manhattan townhouse from this same period generated considerable buzz last week). Browne also continues to out-preppy himself, polishing and elevating the codes of American sportswear with “snob appeal” details such as his signature animal motifs now in gold-bullion embroidery, novelty fringed argyle, antique-effect repp-stripe ensembles, and “military-grade cashmere.” As he tells it, “You won’t appreciate the cashmere; your son or daughter won’t appreciate it; your grandson or granddaughter will.”It’s good sustainability positioning, but it also assumes his top-to-toe looks have generational staying power. For now, anyway, most people who wear Thom Browne are all-in, proudly donning a uniform that conveys an incongruous mix of exactitude and whimsy.
They don’t just purchase this season’s skirt and jacket incrusted with a giraffe; they purchase the matching coat, the intarsia sweater, the Oxford shirt, the argyle socks, and the quirky shoes. That’s why the expanding range of technical and classic outerwear pieces seemed like the big takeaway this season. Whether a pastel pink shearling, down-filled puffers, a waterproof Mackintosh, or tailored Harris tweed coats, they were excellently designed and flexible to styling. And yes, one imagines they could be worn by all.
28 November 2019
Thom Browne invited fashion folk to stop and smell the roses this afternoon, with a show set that was straight out of the gardens of Versailles. Conjuring weird and wonderful landscapes is Browne’s strong suit; hence the flowers were a surrealist twist on the real thing, fashioned from classic seersucker cotton. There was a fountain cut from the same cloth in the middle of the runway with a particularly attention-grabbing water feature: its cheeky little cherub appeared to be taking a pee.The American prepster has always offered a wellspring of inspiration for Browne. Each season he manages to splice and dice those unmistakable WASP-y dress codes with his own broad-ranging lexicon of historical and art-world obsessions. For Spring he was drawn towards the unabashed decadence of France before the Revolution. Panniers are easily the most unexpected trend to have surfaced this season, showing up on runways first in London with Matty Bovan, then again in Paris at Loewe, Balenciaga, and in markedly iconoclastic form at Rick Owens. With models in towering wigs and powdered pink faces, Browne’s vision of the 18th-century silhouette aligned most closely with the original. Case in point: Anna Cleveland teetered down the runway in the brand’s new floating seersucker mules wearing a dress that owed its waist-whittling line to traditional corsetry. There was often a layer cake of prettiness underneath the rigorous feminine architecture: petticoats and ruffled bloomers in the softest pastel shades, for example. Browne hardly plays by conventional gender rules from head to toe, however. His signature gray flannel suits were stripped back to their red, white, and blue lining in places, revealing traditional men’s boxer shorts that were buoyed by suspenders.While other designers have made the switch to co-ed runway shows, Browne still presents his menswear and womenswear separately, the old-fashioned way. More often than not though, the two collections are in conversation with each other, as was the case this season. Where Marie Antoinette provided a radical urgency to Browne’s men’s show in Paris this past June, opening up a conversation about gender that has been rumbling through fashion for the last couple of years, her influence failed to have the same political resonance in the context of his women’s offering, especially when you factor in the number of times the ill-fated French queen has been evoked by designers for inspiration in the past.
Still, when it comes to pure flights of fancy and exquisite handwork, Browne is hard to beat. In a season that was brimming with alternative bridal options, this collection had several compelling options. The finale dress worn by the gorgeous Alek Wek was a good example, furnished with a cascading bustled train that would look dreamy coming down the aisle.
29 September 2019
The canopy-free parasols were a meteorologically ironic insertion into this typically sumptuous Thom Browne show, given the punishing heat in the glass-roof École des Beaux-Arts this afternoon. They were just one small part of a theatrical runway fantasy, in which Browne—recast as Monsieur Brun in his show notes—imagined himself as a host at what he called a Versailles country club.Playing Brun was no less than James Whiteside, one of American Ballet Theatre’s principal dancers, who emerged palely powdered with ceruse and tricolor blue bee-stung lips, wearing a high-cut seersucker tutu. He cut a marvelous swath as he prepared for his garden party. This involved overseeing the preparation of 10 “statues,” which were in fact 10 very game models clad in horizontally enormous 2-D trompe l’oeil renderings of the 3-D outfits worn beneath them, which were short suits in various shades of seersucker accessorized with seersucker footballs, basketballs, and baseballs. They were shod in black and white brogued basketballs topped by pulled-high mismatched sport socks. Their outfits were revealed by attendants in sport shorts, pointy-toe corespondent shoes, and Browne-skinny jackets whose skirts barely brushed the matching codpiece/jockstrap also worn below.All this, mind you, before the first look of the collection. Browne’s guests strode onto his metaphorical lawn with more corespondents, these with a curved 2 inches or so exposed inset heel that elevated the ball of the foot above the flat sole beneath it. The outfits, like the latticed football helmet worn by one of the attendants, made lavish use of the wide-to-each-side silhouette created by Marie Antoinette–era pannier dresses. In the pieces adorned with prep-staple marine patching there was another irony in the fashion interplay of whale and whalebone (happily, though, no whale tail). Against that broadening ying tugged the narrowing yang of corsetry, from which were suspended literally drop-waist skirts. Pretty much everything was seersucker, sometimes patched, sometimes fringed, sometimes embroidered—but always seersucker.The American tradition of men’s dress from which Browne mines his material is via Ivy League, rooted in sport, and here there were sportif accessories galore: basketball bags, soccer ball bags, football bags—a lot of ball bags, basically.
Some of the seersucker panniers worn on the shoulder lent a prettily garlanded, football-echoing bulk to the form within, and one exposed pannier skirt featured seersucker balls that rested between it and either side of the wearer’s hip. Browne is a highly popular designer among professional sports players, of course, and he explained today’s play thus: “I’ve always use sports as a reference, and today, playing with the severity of the 18th-century reference, grounding it in sports, was a way to bring it into the men’s world.”
22 June 2019
“When quality is so important, I think you also have to counterbalance that with something that makes it seem not so serious. Fun is key.” That was Thom Browne speaking from his label’s Paris showroom right after showing off a dress with trompe l’oeil paneling and decorative gold embroidered buttons.If quality has seemed like a given at Thom Browne—precision tailoring and fastidious polish being the most outward signs—the designer said today that he wants the women’s collections to be as process-oriented as the menswear. The brand has always normalized a certain masculine-feminine exchange—see: women’s suiting and men’s skirts—yet this will now extend to how the clothes are made. Hence the frequency with which guy and gal appear together in these images, their looks approaching an asymptote of identicalness. Of course, it also offers an opportunity to communicate that the men have a pre-collection, too. As messages of equality extend outward across all domains, consider this Thom Browne’s contribution.Whether found on the inner canvas construction of the classic slightly undersized blazers; the new lightweight wool-mohair seersucker; or the finishing touches on every fresh variation of tweed, there were subtle yet discernible signs of impressive workmanship. With the label operating under the Zegna umbrella since last August, such breadth of fabric development is surely among the many perks.But for all the investment pieces, fun was interwoven through and through, from incrustations of crustaceans to patchwork in a palette of preppy hues. And for every handsome addition—the black seersucker jacket, a highlight—there were several more items intended for daily dress. For anyone who loves a good oxford shirt, these ones were perfectly sized and desirably tagged with the Thom Browne tricolor. Baseball caps are being positioned as the season’s key accessory, while the Mrs. Thom bag returns with softer side panels that smartly counterbalance the boxiness.Regarding the diving-dolphin motif, when Browne swam as a kid, this was the team’s mascot. As a shiny double-zip leather bag—the shape not unlike a pool toy—it joins Hector the dog in reinforcing Browne’s idiosyncratic, un-boring approach to work-meets-play.
31 May 2019
No one loves a fashion fantasy more than Thom Browne. Guessing where his imagination will go next is part of the thrill of the show. Still, his brand has been built on a down-to-business aesthetic, one that begins and ends with a gray flannel suit.At Browne’s Fall show this afternoon, the first troop of models was clearly on the clock, each one marching towards a desk that was furnished with an old typewriter and a chic mid-century modern lamp. After last season’s death-trap heels, the click-clack of sensible brogues against the wooden floor was a reassuring sound. Browne ditched his curious fetish for masks, too. Instead, his women had monocles and spectacles suspended in front of their eyes, all the better to see the runway and the world.On that sure footing, Browne proposed three distinct uniforms for Fall. The first, his signature: an ankle-nipped pantsuit; the second, a bourgeois pleated skirtsuit; the third a midi-length sheath cut loose through the body. Browne tends to twist all notions of perceived reality in his clothes, and trompe l’oeil motifs gave the illusion of layered tailoring. There were some highly intricate applications of the idea, including one dress that appeared like a pointillist reimagining of a suit. Look close enough and you could trace the minuscule pearls that studded the outline of a tie, a shirt, and the three-piece skirtsuit. It was tough to pick standouts, given the couture-like trimmings that were applied to virtually every piece. One look appeared like a smorgasbord of textured red, white, and blue tweeds, for example.Several portraits of Lady Una Troubridge by Romaine Brooks, the 1920s French artist who was known for her grayscale paintings of women in androgynous clothing, were writ large in the collection. In the case of one cropped tuxedo suit, Brooks’s portrait was even bigger than life-size. Ultimately though, Browne was referencing his own canon, specifically his first menswear show at Pitti 10 years ago. This time around there were no elaborate flights of fancy, just Thom Browne at his most exquisite and essential. His female fans won’t have much trouble putting that fashion notion to work.
3 March 2019
Thom Browne shows are not unlike a tea ceremony. Stylized and precise: reliably very late and veryslooow. But when you get your cup of tea in the end, it satisfies. Today Browne brewed a bubble-wrapped 12-chapter meditation on the feminine potential of the structure of tailored men’s clothing, in which each chapter had three parts. What follows is a Grammarly-simple summation of what was a very carefully wrought—if perhaps a little cold and inconsiderate of the wearer—lyrical poem in clothing that was staged in a Bubble Wrap set.The prologue saw eight guys in brimless stovepipes, gloves, and dresses made from Bubble Wrap emerge from backstage and stalk around the 36 bubble-wrapped packages on display stands that ran the course of the runway. Like all of the models in this show, their faces were encased in puckered transparent plastic, as if bubble-wrapped. Then, to a mournful oboe, their master of ceremonies (whose gray marshmallow-whip dye job and Bubble Wrap frock coat made him resemble a deep-frozen Tom Hulce inAmadeus) ushered them to the sidelines.Then came the main movement. This was 12 groups of looks, each three looks strong, in which the first was invariably a kink-ified and corseted bold-shouldered expression—atop brogued Mary Janes—of a look featuring fabrics and materials that are long-term meat and drink to Thom Browne. In part two of each chapter, the first look was collapsed into a single garment as a trompe l’oeil dress. And in the third part, each element from the first look was revived, but turned radically inside out or upside down to create what were in essence lavishly draped womenswear looks assembled from a bricolage of the first part menswear source material. Got it?Finally, epilogue: Frozen Tom Hulce returned with his retainers to reveal what was under each of those display stands—tiny little felt versions of all the looks we had just seen.Backstage, Browne said in womenswear he starts his collections by making these perfectly formed little renderings of the looks to come, but that it was the first time he had transferred the process to “menswear.” He added: “I thought it was really interesting to show how the collection started, the small mannequins of each look. And as opposed to a finale to show this beginning of the collection at the end.
”Given that the collection was so overtly feminized, what did this transfer of a womenswear process to his menswear signify? “I think almost a feminine womenswear approach is interesting for guys nowadays. It was interesting for me because the shape of the jackets and the corsetry underneath it look really, really good . . . and I love the idea of all of the pieces coming into a trompe l’oeil dress. And I love the idea of guys wearing dresses. I think it’s an interesting time, that guys are really open to so much more right now.”Browne added that from his authorial eye there was a hierarchy in each of the 12 chapters’ trilogy of looks, whose order went: “good, better, best.” An exercise in turning “menswear” into “womenswear,” it made you reconsider as fundamentally dubious the arbitrary differences between the two that we are so culturally ingrained to accept and perpetuate. The only frustration was that when you jumped up and down on that Bubble Wrap, it didn’t pop.
19 January 2019
Only upon leaving the walk-through with Thom Browne, in his upscale institutional showroom situated in the heart of high-end Paris, did the perfect description of his two most recent collections come to mind: prep-à-porter!Apologies, Thom, if you dislike the wordplay. But as a continuation of his Spring ‘19, Pre-Fall once again riffs on American preppy codes through the tradition and fine execution of ready-to-wear, twisting classic tailoring and fabrics with a certain Parisian flair. Looks featured patchwork striped rep fabrics; varsity jackets that descended towards the knees; and patterns of ducks (replacing Hector the dog, apparently). Yet there was also delicate Lesage embroidery and handwoven tweed. The net effect was somewhat bipolar in its youthful-sophisticated duality; yet the clothes had all-ages appeal.As usual, experimental techniques coexisted with sartorial precision; the fraying that had resulted from washing certain fabrics felt eccentrically on-brand, as did the perfectly shrunken jackets and roomy men’s coats. Browne emphasized his interest in a “half calf” skirt length, saying, “For me it feels really strong and really young.”Without prompt, he singled out an ample sack jacket and wide column dress that looked like an oversize pant leg, both in a peppery Donegal tweed, as the key statement of the collection. But certain sportier and evening looks were just as persuasive; from a jacket that had its bastings and linings on the outside, to a tunic embroidered with a silvery landscape scene that looked even more original when worn over an extra-long white shirt.Browne noted that while the pre-collections speak to reality compared to the high-impact, couture-approximate approach he favors for the runway, there remains a through line. “If [an idea] is strong in the women’s collection, it doesn’t go away—it just might play out in items that are easier.”Intentional or not, this seemed like an acknowledgement of the October show in which cheerful allusions to Cape Cod were destabilized with unhinged proportions, horror-movie-style masks, arms bound tight to bodies, and mismatched heels that were accidents waiting to happen. Here, white long underwear cuffed with the Thom Browne tricolor grosgrain was a harmless leitmotif—night and day in comfort terms. Still, this reviewer was reminded of her high school uniform and the classmates who layered sweatpants under their kilts.
Then as now, the combination was stylistically rebellious—bunched-up leggings as a counterpoint to the sharply tailored investment pieces. Let’s just say this sums up prep-à-porter. And we have Thom Browne to thank if it catches on.
10 December 2018
Thom Browne is known for his evocative set designs. The blue-and-white–striped wood huts decorated with American flags and lifeguard towers that were erected on the runway today called to mind Nantucket’s sandy shores. Browne isn’t the only one yearning for the beach this season, though his preppy landscape was far removed from the bohemian escapes we’ve seen conjured thus far. Still, nothing in this designer’s world is quite what it seems. He twists and turns cultural references through the labyrinth of his imagination to spectacular effect. Men in pleated skirts and pointy gnome hats were the first to populate Browne’s Spring fantasyland, eliciting smiles from the front row as they distributed colorful gerbera daisies.The collection then unfurled with a parade of wildly glamorous and absurdist nautical looks. Browne’s signature grosgrain-trimmed flannel suit was reconfigured as a gold sequin–encrusted mermaid dress and matching cropped jacket, complete with trompe l’oeil oyster shell bustier and dramatic tulle fishtail. The collage techniques he’s been developing lately were taken to a couture-level conclusion via recognizable prepster tropes—seersucker, gingham, whale and anchor motifs—that were rendered in every luxurious fabrication you could possibly think of, then spliced, diced, and reassembled with whipstitching. The resulting Frankenstein pieces were both meticulous in their brilliance and demented in their proportions.Browne is a provocateur by nature, and pushing the performative boundaries of fashion is just as important to him as advancing the awe-inspiring technical aspects of his work. He recast the most innocuous signifiers of summer—beach balls, watering cans, ice cream cones—asFriday the 13th–style face masks, lending an ominous undercurrent to the collection. It was hard not to feel unsettled by the jackets and coats that had models quite literally trussed up in fraying silk and tulle, as if they’d been washed ashore in tangled yet exquisite fisherman’s nets. And perhaps that was the point. Browne’s dreamiest fashion reveries tend to be a complex web of the beautiful and the terrifying. Indeed, it often seems as if he intentionally undermines the overt prettiness of his clothes, perhaps in order to deepen the personal fantasy that defines the Thom Browne experience.
Whichever way you choose to interpret the elaborate styling and staging of the show, it is difficult to imagine a street/boardwalk/universe fit for Browne’s death-defying, mismatched shoes. It was painful to watch the models hobble down the catwalk at a snail’s pace, the fear that they might fall intensifying with each slow step. That long-held fondness for killer heels no longer holds water on the runway, let alone in the real world. His dazzling, one-of-a-kind designs would stand just as tall without them.
30 September 2018
Parisian eyebrows must certainly have been raised by the sight of the comings and goings from Mr. Thom Browne’s academy—sorry, his showroom—on the Avenue Montaigne last week. Is there any other company on earth whose adult staff dresses in gray school uniform—box pleat skirts for women, shorts for men, shirts and ties for both? His ability to face both ways—toward absolute conservatism on the one hand, and wild eccentricity on the other—has no equal in fashion, or anywhere else come to that. It gives even a visit to view the Resort collection an unnerving frisson.Still, the number of store executives sitting at desks placing orders says that the school of Thom Browne has international appeal. This season, the subject on his curriculum was a refresher in “the true meaning of American sportswear”—athleisure in its sloppy modern sense, no relation to streetwear, but a return to what originally made American fashion distinctive: luxuriously rendered clothes referencing tennis, golf, sailing, and so on. They are serious clothes, these, what with the extraordinary way they are made, but subverted somewhat by the playfully surreal way Browne elongates, styles, and shoots them.It was a collection of two halves: city clothes (quite a few gray uniform variants, with piqué shirts grown into long underdresses) and preppy summer vacationwear. Close up, there was a pristine, breathtaking prettiness in the candy-striped shirting pieces, be they a blazer, a suit, or a corseted bustier dress. The specialness of the detail, in the form of tiny raw edges or extraordinarily-embroidered sequined beach motifs, rewards all study.
26 June 2018
Because it’s poor form to open whatever bag or box a house might leave on your chair at a show—you check the loot in the car afterwards—the vast majority of the audience at this preppily pogonophile, gnomo-exotic, Technicolor kaleidoscope of a Thom Browne show watched it with bare eyes. Most of us did not connect the note Browne left that read, “Please see the world through my eyes . . . please . . .” next to a sunglasses box and a lollipop.Even without the tinted-lens wire-framed spectacles within those boxes, this show had a surreal enough filter. The grand hall of the École des Beaux-Arts had been laid with turf, separated from the audience by a low white picket fence. Around the edges of the lawn were scattered garden gnomes, wheelbarrows, and bunches of balloons—also in the audience—which were all-white. In the middle of the lawn was another picket fence, with pickets that came in every color, surrounding a pink-and-red child’s playhouse through whose little blue-framed window you could just make out the knobbly knee and Browne-gray stick-on gnome beard of the lanky model within. The house was surrounded by plant pots abloom with pincushions, snapdragons, peonies, and sunflowers.Two bearded models in very high gnome hats pushing white-painted old-fashioned rotary lawnmowers, wearing back-to-front knee-length gray tailored shorts/pants attached with suspenders outside the hems of their gray jackets, came out and began to “mow.” The fellow in the playhouse got to open his its cute little door. Taking control of a flower-filled wheelbarrow, he started distributing them to the front row, before returning to his rainbow-picket safe place as the show-proper began.This was another show of two halves from Browne. Post-gnome intro, looks two through 30 represented the first half. Looks 31 through 59 were a second half, whose outfits and order was a shrunken reflection of the first half. To cut to the chase—even though this Browne-authored world of pure imagination was fun to linger in—the finale saw each mirrored look walk side by side, arm in arm, and openly together.The looks, whether atypically oversize or more typically hot-wash shrunken, were acid-envisaged, couture-level, hyper-colored realizations of preppy White Anglo-Saxon Protestant America.
Whales, crabs, anchors, and sailboats were embroidered on jauntily hemmed wide-wale corduroy shorts or slim pants, set in fur or wool intarsia blazers or embroidered into chinos worn beneath cricket sweaters and sou’westers. The footwear was brogued platform correspondent shoes or boots—pant-length dependent. The socks—in a wild move for the symmetrically inclined Browne—were mismatched throughout. There was a crab on a crotch and a beautiful blue whale man bag. Each model wore a straw bowler with a flower affixed to its colorful ribbon and a different-color lensed pair of round-framed sunglasses. Each model’s chin was softly stained with a different-hued buttercup reflection. The final look was everything at once, back to oversize—an as-much-as-they-could amalgam of what started with the backwards-panted gray-suited gnomes at the top of the show.The soundtrack was important too. Before it began, a Muzak cover of Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow” was a too-subtle reinforcement of Browne’s desire that we wear his yellow-lensed glasses. Bowie sang “There Is a Happy Land.”Backstage Browne was at first—appropriately enough—gnomically enigmatic. He said: “We were throwing it all into the wind and going for it. You saw where all the proportions started 17 years ago and then you saw those proportions.”Like his proportions, Browne loosened up: “We started with the gnomes because they are funny, just nonsense. . . . It really was taking where it all began and playing with the proportions of the season. I think a lot of people don’t know where it goes in real life. . . .” This was real life? “That’s why you had the frames to see the world through my eyes! You didn’t get that?” Ahhh! “It was just nonsense and ridiculous and I wanted it all to be that. And Pride . . . a world where everybody gets along.”
23 June 2018
Thom Browne set up his show space like an art studio this evening, with an all-female model army lined up at easels along the runway. The idea, as Browne put it, was to imagine “Vigée Le Brun painting a vision of what she wanted to be in the 21st century.” The 18th-century artist was a trailblazer, rising to fame and fortune as Marie Antoinette’s official portraitist in a fiercely male-dominated milieu. She would no doubt have been completely enthralled by the subversive tableau of feminine power that Browne conjured tonight.As the lights went up on the first look, Madonna’s rousing dance anthem “Vogue” blared from the speakers, immediately setting the tone. The silhouette—strong shoulder, padded hip, nipped waist—was unmistakably classic. It’s through this curvilinear framework that Browne filtered a myriad of exquisite reworkings of a woman’s wardrobe from the inside out. The anatomy of a sexy dress has been pulled apart several times this season, though only Browne could reconstruct it with such deliciously twisted ingenuity. The notion of lingerie dressing took on an entirely new meaning with his tongue-in-cheek trompe l’oeil flourishes. One floor-length gray flannel dress came embroidered with the faint shadow of a nude female body. Many of the models appeared to be wearing their pants and skirts around their ankles, as if they’d been caught mid-striptease. Others sported looks with split personalities—tailored Crombies on one side, fetching bustiers on the other—turning the art of seduction on its head. There were several alluring standalone coats in the lineup, too, ranging from blazers that were tightly sculpted to the body to a fur-trimmed puffer.It’s no accident that Browne chose to render his collection in 50 shades of gray flannel, dare we say the very fabric of the patriarchy. The designer has made toying with the line that traditionally divides a man’s and a woman’s wardrobe a subtle art form; in Browne’s world, skirts and suits are essentially gender-neutral. So when a troop of men in heels and fluffy dog heads came bounding down the runway—to the sounds of “Who Let the Dogs Out” no less!—the audience all but raised a cheer. Browne’s male models were on a short leash quite literally, under the watchful eye of a stunning mistress dressed in a gown fit for an 18th-century queen. In the age of #MeToo and #TimesUp, when power structures in the workplace are undergoing a seismic shift, the symbolism was potent.
The show closed with Carly Simon’s “Let the River Run,” a song that won an Oscar for Original Song on theWorking Girlsoundtrack in 1989, and each model struck a final pose. Editors and buyers leaned in to take a closer look at some of the breathtaking handwork on the clothes—pearl studding, beading, exquisite appliqué, and more. “We were sewing roses onto the clothes up until 5 minutes before the show started,” said Browne, breathing a happy sigh of relief. (Side note: Some of the most gorgeous flowers in the bunch were handmade from mink.) The couture craftsmanship was nothing short of magical, and made for an unforgettable portrait of a lady.
4 March 2018
Thom Browne really has a lot on his plate since he opted to transport his shows from New York to Paris. “I did put the pressure on myself,” he said as he walked through his extensive Pre-Fall showroom collection. A week on, he was orchestrating a large Fall menswear production in which he filled the École des Beaux-Arts with snow and had male models in gray onesies climbing into sleeping bags on a row of camp beds. In the twinkling of an eye, his Spring women’s show will be held in early March. But all his pressure is surely proving worth it: After his last, otherworldly womenswear performance in September—with its dancers, character costumes, and mind-blowing application of fabric techniques—next time, European audiences are guaranteed to be jostling for seats to see what this new guy in town has in store.Yet, of course, Browne is far from a neophyte in fashion, having been producing ready-to-wear since 2003 and with a substantial network of stores with his name above the door in China, Japan, Korea, and England, as well as in the States. What’s special about his work, for all its quirky faerie–sci-fi aura, is the startling quality of its textures and branding devices, which can’t really be appreciated on a screen.The closer you get to it, the more rigorously American it becomes, harking back to prep school uniforms on the one hand and the American sportswear tradition of camel-hair coats and gray turtlenecks on the other. One way or another, it’s all classics: striped cotton poplin shirts, kilts, puffers, madras checks, tweed jackets, school ties. What makes it Thom Browne? Something in the narrow perpendicular shapes; the meticulous binding of inner seams with red, white, and blue; and the flash of the grosgrain ribbons and bows, which are a kind of brand identifier, logically scattered all over his clothes.Ease is one American fashion trait Browne doesn’t carry forward. His layers—jackets over coats, over tailored skirts—can be pried apart, with the pieces worn separately. Finally, he loves Hollywood glamour, too. There’s a Cecil B. DeMille–worthy trompe l’oeil one-shoulder silver Deco gown with a sparkly pastie on one breast here. Chicer still is the narrow gray moire taffeta evening sheath with a matching fur-trimmed jacket. Browne noted it had been inspired by “Olivia de Havilland inHush, Hush . . . Sweet Charlotte.
” The reference might pass anyone by, but for the woman looking for a dignified way to dress for evening, it elegantly ticks all the boxes. The still discreet provenance of this beautifully simple look will only work to the wearer’s advantage.
30 January 2018
Thom Browne’s shows always come with a narrative: This one wasTom Brown’s Schooldaysas set in a midwinter, sylvan Narnia (with pigtails, and without the violence). The scene was a snow-floored forest scattered with saplings and divided by a long line of camp beds, upon each of which was a rolled-up sleeping bag. Two tall fairy godfathers/alfresco dorm monitors in full-skirted white dresses worn under fur vests and netted balaclavas emerged. They idly wandered, sometimes picking up the snow and letting it fall through their fingers.This was when the collection proper started coming out. Around halfway through it a young man wearing a backflap-less gray union suit, gray socks, and a long pom-pom-peaked gray beanie joined the floor, clutching a teddy bear. Like all the models wearing the collection, he sported a pair of long pigtails. The first of about 30 others who would follow, he made his way to his allotted camp bed, unrolled his bag, slipped in, and pulled on a gray leather sleeping mask. The full-dressed dorm monitors came along to brush off the snow and tuck him (and teddy) in.At the end of the show, when all the beds were filled and all the looks had come and gone, the dorm monitors receded to the back of the room and mimed switching off the lights. The lights went off.That’s when we all jumped up to have a look at the models, still faux-asleep on their camp beds. Intarsia-imposed upon every down-filled sleeping bag was a slim-fitting gray Thom Browne suit—the emblematic ensemble of this designer. “The sleeping bag was the gray suit of this season,” he said backstage. “I think a lot of people see what I do as just tailoring, but there is so much sportswear within the collection as well, and that’s been probably the most recent development.”This was certainly a collection of luxuriously elevated, tailoring-inflected but sportswear-leaning garments: sportswear that looked stitched. Typically but not exclusively, the fabrication of the outerwear reflected the garments beneath. So a crimson rib-knit, double-breasted coat—canvassed but also padded with piumino—was worn with rib-knit blue pants and a white rib jacket beneath. A down-filled black corduroy parka similarly defined the rest of its look, as did outerwear in Fair Isle, pinstripe, chalk stripe, and check. Sometimes there was a more mixed-up look—say, a white cloak with mink muff worn over shorts and gaiters.
Special house-code asides included the down-filled suit overlaid with lace depicting Browne’s hound, Hector, plus a similarly patterned fur throw. Watching this show it was hard not to flash back to Browne’s recently ceased Gamme Bleu outings for Moncler. Whether for that house or his own, his facility for technical, tailored, and luxuriously fabricated winterwear—shorts aside—was evident today.
20 January 2018
Thom Browne likes to create an alternate universe for his clothes, and for his first women’s show in Paris he conjured an otherworldly scene of epic proportions. Men dressed in all-white organza skirt suits, corsets, and four-inch heels greeted guests who arrived at the Hôtel de Ville with magic wands and pouches full of glittery fairy dust. The possibility of magic and mischief hung thick in the air. “Two girls dreaming of unicorns and mermaids, and all the things that little girls dream of,” was Browne’s initial point of departure. He used the sweet siren call of Jodi Benson’s “Part of Your World,” fromThe Little Mermaidsoundtrack, to set the tone, though as ballerinas in lumpy, pearl-studded bodysuits danced down the runway, it was hardly what you’d call a fairy-tale beginning.Then again, Browne’s retelling of a Disney classic was never going to be conventional. Instead he used Ariel’s underwater habitat as a springboard for his own freewheeling imagination, tumbling down an exquisite rabbit hole of fantastically chic possibilities. The pink and green tentacles of an octopus that were wrapped around one evening dress were almost lifelike in their appearance, with layers of organza piled across the back to form a head. One glittering skirt suit came encrusted with thousands of sequins that looked like crushed mother of pearl, and another was spun from spongy clouds of tulle that trailed behind the model as she walked down the runway like grass at the bottom of the ocean. In fact all the looks had the same mesmerizing buoyancy, as if they might just float off into the sunset to find their own happy ending at any given moment.The couture-like finish of the clothes was even more spellbinding up close when Browne had his models standing in a dazzling fairy-tale tableau at the end of the show, complete with sleeping beauties. Technically speaking, the approach had a surprisingly simple narrative: Take all the familiar American tropes, including plaid, madras, and quilting, and render them in tulle. In a season of transparency, Browne’s use of the delicate fabric was undoubtedly the most impressive. But beyond the intricacy and ethereal nature of the clothes, there was a bigger, more important story here. Where some designers submerge themselves in the real world, Browne has always posited fashion as fantasy, dreaming bigger, pushing the eye to places it didn’t know existed.
At a time when the world feels like a pretty bleak place indeed, his brand of escapism is more appealing than ever. It only makes sense then, that Browne should close his show with a life-size unicorn puppet instead of a bride—the mythical creature is surely his spirit animal. The fashion world could use more of his kind.
3 October 2017
When Thom Browne was a baby he got a pair of baby shoes. Formless moccasins. Genderless, darling little bootees. And they were never thrown away. For it is, apparently, a rather beautiful Browne family tradition to dip all Browne newcomers’ first pair of shoes in gold as remembrance and celebration. Tonight, placed in a vitrine and given the addition of a tricolor Browne label, these teeny-weeny shoes were at the center of a powerfully transgressive show.“I like the idea that when you are a baby you wear pretty much the same clothing as your brothers and sisters. And I think that culture dictates which way and what kind of clothing you wear—but it is nice that you can pretty much do whatever you want,” said the designer backstage.But of course we don’t wear whatever we want, do we? Because there are some things we are conditioned not to want—to not even consider. Convention dictates that a whole swathe of clothing options are exclusive to one gender or another. Actually, it is men who are pretty much the more hidebound gender in this regard. We still celebrate Le Tuxedo for women. But when, apart from the amazing but culturally specific outliers of drag or traditional dress, do we celebrate Le Skirt for men?Tonight Browne remedied that deficiency by proposing that there is no pale beyond which we should ever feel prohibited from dressing. The poles of gender norms were represented by two vitrines on either end of a runway, bathed in the music from the filmOrlando. In the first the models passed was a pair of gold-plated flat brogues. In the other, closest to the photographers, was a pair of gold-plated heeled brogues, around 2 inches high.Every model wore the heeled version, and as they passed a third, central vitrine that contained Browne’s own baby shoes, they cast a meaningful sideways glance at it. “I wanted them to look at the baby shoes, reminiscing back to the day it all started. When they could choose whichever path they wanted,” said Browne. In this alternate world his men chose a different path. Browne had adapted his seasonal women’s collection for his male models, and presented a broad swathe of skirts—pencil, midi, maxi, pleated—in mostly masculine gray wools. There were also short-shorts and culottes, worn under cropped jackets, and a couple of long dresses too. Sometimes the tails of elongated shirts acted as underskirts beneath the more conformist jackets above.
Some pieces featured another golden child in Browne’s world: an indented golden profile of Hector, the famous fashion hound he co-adores with Andrew Bolton. Each look’s pair of heeled brogues was topped by a pair of mismatched socks, one plain black, one white-striped, which reinforced the sense of stretched dialectic.
25 June 2017
It goes without saying thatThom Browneis known for his tailoring. What’s less often noted is the designer’s passion for fabrics—and as often as not, it’s his inspired choice of textiles that really makes his collections sing. This was a Browne collection in which the materials felt like the main story. It wasn’t just the splashy stuff, such as the confetti tweed woven out of cotton and denim and silk and jupe and tulle, or the spray-painted mink; simpler fabrications also came to the fore. Madras plaid was a big theme here, with Browne mixing and matching the classic preppy check in painterly ways. There were also solid-color madras cottons, salt-shrunk to give the material some heft and hand and sometimes decorated with bead embroidery. Some of Browne’s nicest pieces were his salt-shrunk cotton shift dresses—uncharacteristically simple in shape and uncharacteristically short—embellished with beads in the form of tennis rackets. It was the rare Resort season look that really did seem made to be worn at a resort.There was more where that came from. Although Browne’s broad range of grayscale tailored looks were nicely done, per usual, and the tweeds and plaids had a lot of pep, it was in his pursuit of the tennis theme that he best balanced his senses of nattiness and silliness. A long evening blouse of fine, racket-patterned lace? What better thing to wear to a reception at Wimbledon. Only his tennis whites–inspired ensembles could compete for that honor. Meanwhile, for ladies less eager to embrace soigné sportif looks, Browne had a few more classic evening options: His bustier dresses made for a nice counterpoint to both the athletic kit-inspired pieces and the androgynous sack jackets and tailored jumpsuits. They also marked a contrast with this outing’s dominant, strong-shoulder, waistless shapes. There was a little something for everyone, in other words—especially the tennis-obsessed.
7 June 2017
Thom Brownecan seem, at times, a clinical designer. His clothes are so thoroughly conceptual that they may come across as cool to the touch. Ironically, this season radiated warmth. That was ironic because Browne put a chill in the air at his catwalk show this evening, making his set look like a frozen-over lake, and sending the models out on platforms—treacherous ones, it must be said—that mocked the look of ice skate blades. The heat was generated, though, by the craft in this collection. If you want to feel Thom Browne—to comprehend what makes him tick—you must attend to the care he’s put into his clothes. This collection had so much care it felt unusually intimate.Browne’s latest outing was all about fabrics, really. Eschewing any dresses at all, he sent out a wide variety of suit-inspired ensembles that derived their occasionally extraordinary charm from the materials Browne developed to make them. These ranged from a material constructed from looped thread to iterations on an intarsia theme to quilted fabrics that showed off the puffer expertise Browne has attained during his tenure at Moncler Gamme Bleu. The most special of Browne’s textiles were the patchwork argyles and fabrics made from sewn-together ribbon; these worked against the uniformity of his tailored looks with their suggestion of delicacy or volatility, or both. It was that tension that accounted for this collection’s uncharacteristic heat.It must also be noted that, for all its many flourishes, this lineup boasted a large number of pieces that could appeal beyond the natural Thom Browne fan base. The natty jackets in their idiosyncratic fabrications, the fur-trimmed outerwear, the cropped trousers cut broader than Browne’s wont, the accessible puffer jackets—all of these had broad appeal. The show’s penguin theme was a tougher sell. But it nevertheless felt personal to Browne, in a good way. A dapper little bird indeed, the penguin is surely Browne’s spirit animal. In many ways this season, Browne seemed to be saying, “This isme.”
16 February 2017
Consider the gray suit. Can you imagine any garment more hellishly dull? It’s the ultimate expression-in-cloth of white-male conformity. It’s what The Man wears, at least in a mid-weight herringbone Harris Tweed. Still, whether it’s single or double-breasted, single- or double-vented, with a lapel peaked or notched (shawled is just a touch too louche)—what could be more “classic”? More boring? You might opt for low-rise and skinny pants if you’re young but not into fashion, but will probably prefer wider pants, pleated, with either a carrot-leg or a straight-leg if you’re either older or young and into fashion. Team it with a classic Chesterfield, topcoat or double-breasted, and a pair of zug-grained Goodyear welted black brogues and you have an ensemble that is, let’s face it, prettymeh. Because it’s just a gray suit. Until tonight. Thom Browne’s show was a three-piece suite on the suit (and its trappings), which aimed, via extreme distortion, to unpick, lay flat, then reveal as a thing of beauty the garment around which Browne has built his brand. The show’s set was 30 piles of thick gray felt—pattern offcuts—arranged in little shrine-like cairns under 30 workroom lamps. To easily understand this show you have look at Look 1 against Look 16 and then Look 31. Or Look 2 against Look 17 and Look 32. And so on. Browne was building the same 15 suits (and variations of) in three ways. The first 15 were arguably the freakiest. On mules (which resembled hooves), the models were cinched into bodysuits on which buttons delineated the outline of the garment Browne envisioned them as. This took a lot of buttons, and Browne’s press notes usefully transmitted exactly how many. So Look 15, my favorite simply for being the biggest and most extreme in its second part iteration, was comprised of 1,059 of these buttons, which were the stitches that linked and defined the outline of a double-breasted suit and a double-breasted greatcoat. Really, though, you had to stare pretty hard at the buttons—or read the notes—to get any of that detail for the first 15 looks. The chief impression was of a tentatively treading band of boardroom brothers locked forever in a John Cage–soundtracked endless commute, mitigated only by whatever would fit in that rolling suitcase—“Champagne!” Browne said—and the softening lenses of those blinkering helmet-masks. Section two laid out the idea. Every look delineated in section one was represented in the flat sum of its parts from the pattern.
These were worn half at the front, half at the back. By showing the suits and coats and even the shoes—which were uncobbled asunder—in two dimensions, Browne was leading us to consider their intricacies in three. Section three put everything together, via button: Those looks were finally tailored into a more conventional whole. Of course, they were barely conventional at all. Hems zipped up and down more dramatically than theNew York Times’ pre-election winner projector. Hot pants over leggings are simply not done, old boy. Yet, crazy as Browne’s interjections into the architectural niceties of suiting sometimes were, they still honored the spirit of them. Afterward, Browne explained what this show was about: “Playing with proportion. And an appreciation of making clothing really well. Taking all of the pattern pieces and then making an installation of the pattern pieces . . . sewing it all together, buttoning up on the body. That’s what it is! It was a simple idea of playing with proportion.” But what did it mean? Was it a comment about a world gripped by events that seem to defy all previously understood proportion? Browne said not. This was simply a sculptural meditation on the boring old gray suit. “And proportion,” insisted this extraordinary designer, precisely.
22 January 2017
Thom Browne and Andrew Bolton are easily fashion’s most dapper duo. This season, Browne turned to his significant other for inspiration—although not for the way he dresses, but for the way he approaches his role as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. As Browne explained, he wanted to think about his clothes the way that Bolton thinks about the garments in his shows: asobjéts, exemplary works of craftsmanship. Browne has long applied exacting standards to the make of his clothes; this time out, he raised the bar another notch. But he also turned his attention to pieces that were meant to stand on their own.There were two central themes here, both evolved from ideas Browne has explored in the past. The most emphasized theme was trompe l’oeil tailoring, in particular dresses that imitated the look of layered button-down, tie, vest, and jacket by means of intricate intarsia construction. Though the effect was formal, the underlying silhouettes of the day dresses were very easy—mostly lean, square-cut sheaths. For night, on the other hand, Browne didn’t stint on the pizzazz, piling on heaps of bead embroidery. A yet more casual take on the concept was found in Browne’s knitwear, where he marked his first application of the trompe l’oeil tailoring technique to that medium.The other key look here was a deconstructed shirtdress, made to appear like two shirtdresses knotted together at the waist. Again, Browne has played with this idea before, but what felt new was the lightness of the execution, which came through particularly clearly in the shirtdress in silk organza. Even skeptics of Browne’s think-y deconstruction could see the appeal. And that lightness of tone carried through elsewhere in the collection, to the corduroy khakis embroidered with penguins—this season’s hero animal—to the down-quilted puffer jackets in pebbled leather. There was something a little insouciant about Browne’s non-virtual tailoring, with a new, ’70s-inspired jacket cut added to the lineup. Overall, though, the collection was more about its parts than its whole—which was by design. Browne’s goal here was to attend to individual garments, one by one, the same way you would treat a work of art.
11 January 2017
Sometimes going to fashion shows can be a real hassle. TheThom Browneshow tends to be a fight at the door—whoever runs security for Browne ought to be headhunted by the TSA, or on second thought, maybe not—and then Browne’s preferred venue, a bunker-like space in West Chelsea that he lays claim to a month in advance to build his elaborate sets, is notorious for having no phone service and no Wi-Fi. So you’re left at your seat, feeling slightly aggrieved, until the crowd settles in enough that you can take in the environs and start wondering, what, exactly, Browne has up his sleeve for this season’s presentation. The sets lend themselves to daydreaming—this time out, the space had been covered in multicolored tile, and you felt as though you were sitting at the bottom of a vast, empty swimming pool. That association turned out to be the right one.Browne more than made up for the hassle of getting into his show by putting on a proper one. The models entered all at once, in claques of silently gossiping girls dressed in nearly identical voluminous coats appliquéd with graphic flowers, and matching swim cap–like hats. This was, indeed, a pool party—one attended by surreally glamorous Stepford Wives. Then, on cue, the models fell into formation, dropping their carryalls and removing first their caps, then their coats, to reveal dresses in black and white or various combinations of country club pastels, each of which had been assembled to mimic the look of tailoring. Not a jacket in sight, except in the trompe l’oeil effects Browne created via elaborate intarsia, color-blocking, and seam detailing. It was a clever conceit, but unlike other instances of Browne waxing sly, the cleverness didn’t get in the way of the garments’ gut-level appeal. Rather, the sheath silhouettes that Browne used as a canvas for his craftiness forced him to put tight focus on the artisanal elements in the clothes—the weave of ribbons used to create a checkerboard pattern, the topstitch used to suggest the natty combination of jacket, vest, tie, and button-down shirt. Each dress was its own remarkable example of fashion art.And then, in anothercoup de théâtre, the dresses were unzipped from behind, like wetsuits, and dispensed with, so that the models could recline poolside in matching red, white, and blue swimsuits.
Men dressed as birds came to collect the wardrobe detritus, and a goddess dressed in sequin silver took her place at the center of the tableau, her dog-shaped chapeau lighting up like a disco ball. Imagine if Noah’s Ark had been a luxury cruise, or if the upper-class housewives photographed by Slim Aarons had been attended by avian cabana boys. Thom Browne showed his attendees something they'd never seen before—and something they’d never thought they wanted to see.That’show you redeem the Fashion Week rigamarole.
13 September 2016
The grayscale world conjured up each season byThom Browneis bizarre, twisted, sometimes unintentionally hilarious, and sometimes entirely intentionally so. The last is far more entrancing that the first—when you realize Browne is laughing with you, rather than you at him (or, perhaps, vice versa). And so it was for Spring, when Browne decided life was a beach and unleashed one of the wittiest, most memorable, and certainly most bizarre runway stagings of his entire career. Considering they’ve previously involved gilded fauns, menageries of animals and hyperinflated Elmer Fudd lookalikes, and male flappers in Maxim’s, that’s a tall order.Here was the scene: a post-apocalyptic beach of black sand, gray palm tree, and a lounging sunbather in a tight zippered wet suit, like a black-and-white movie still. John Williams’s ominousJawstheme began to play, and a model in a black suit—drop-crotch pants, jacket with a dorsal fin attached, head hidden under a leather shark mask—perambulated out and circled the set. No word of a lie. Then a bunch of shark-attack-ready models waddled out in Fatty Arbuckle onesies, plodding to take their place about the tree. A quick zip and, like a cheap infomercial before and after, the corpulence literally peeled right off, to reveal spangled short suits, tailcoats, and overcoats in brilliant, poolside cocktail shades of orange sorbet, cassata, and piña colada, in fur or tweed or hibiscus flower laces with embroideries of surfboards, and islands, and sharks.Speaking of which, the aforementioned great white was still circling ominously (read: hilariously). At some point, a few seagulls joined him—men in feather-crusted shorts suits and beaked Stephen Jones headpieces, flapping their wings like angels in a preschool nativity play. You couldn’t help but grin, the models then stripping off for a second time, revealing each ensemble to be a fused trompe l’oeil, like a snug wet suit, a reveal worthy of a winningRuPaul’s Drag Racemain-stage lip sync, and just as camp. Underneath each wore a retro-style bathing suit in an eye-popping Lilly Pulitzer–style print. Oh, at some point a couple of macaws joined in. Who knows when, or why. The damn shark was still circling.The models marched off, grabbed a surfboard matching their print, and pitched their stake in the sand. Behind them, the pile of discarded gray fat-suits looked like a mountain of bird guano. The Beach Boys crooned.
26 June 2016
You’d have to be a real jerk to leave a viewing ofThom Browne’s latest without a smile on your face. If this collection had an overarching theme—and it didn’t, really—it was “good vibes.” That attitude ran through the mackintosh fabrics in a variety of Kennebunkport country-club colors, and extended to the flowers embroidered on everything from gray pin-striped coats to a bell-shaped organza frock, and crossed the threshold into sublime silliness in the form of pumps with heels shaped like those spouting whales found on preppy pants. If that all sounds rather Muffy and Buffy, that was sort of the point—at an appointment today, Browne noted that he garnered the inspiration for his palette from the saturated mid-century Americana images found inTime/Life, and that he was looking back, as well, at the upscale American sportswear of that era.Of course, Browne’s Muffys and Buffys aren’t your grandmother’s canasta buddies, so to speak. Browne’s updated versions are apt to don a white piqué coat cobbled together from bits of button-down and blazer and pleated skirt. These and other deconstructed looks riffed on the “appropriated tailoring” Browne explored in his heady show last season. The execution was less chilly and challenging here. And Browne’s other deconstructive touch—the coats and jackets with exposed tailoring, down to the stiffening felt and hand-done pig stitch—wasn’t chilly or challenging at all. His design intellect was on full display, but the garments themselves were perfectly accessible.There was a welcome plainspokenness to many of Browne’s pieces this time out. He showcased his mackintosh fabrics in lean slickers with contrasting fur collars and equally charming white-edged bustiers shown with gown-length skirts. His items in bouclé—another carryover from Fall—were simply cut and limbed with chains. And best of all, there were Browne’s pebbled pastel knits, which looked like nothing much but felt like something of bygone quality. The knits spoke for themselves, the way the easygoing sportswear of Bonnie Cashin or Bill Blass used to. You didn’t have to think your way into these looks. Feeling was enough.
9 June 2016
If you stop and think about it, it’s really weird. The kind of tailoring that isThom Browne’s stock-in-trade has been a fashion concern for well over a hundred years, making it something of an outlier in our society. What other holdovers from the Victorian era do we cling to? We don’t send telegrams. Cars long ago replaced carriages. Women have the vote now; in fact, a woman may even be elected president soon. And so on,ad infinitum, pretty much. Why is the suit—or the button-down shirt and tie along with it—still hanging on after all these years?Thom Browne staged his show this evening on a set meant to evoke Washington Square circa a century ago, a fact that pointed to the atavistic nature of the menswear uniform, which he was yet again extrapolating from, and elaborating upon, in his new collection for women. The way Browne extrapolated and elaborated also made you wonder about the suit’s endurance: Browne was playing aggressive games with his clothes this season, cobbling together garments from component suit elements, to literally surreal effects. (A few showgoers described the looks aspost-tornado-esque.) Are these the lengths a designer must go to make these hoary garments feel fresh?Some of Browne’s experiments were more viable than others. The trouble was that they threatened to overshadow the really beautiful clothes he showed alongside them—bead-detailed bell-shaped dresses, layered jacquard, wool, and broadcloth skirts, long tweed and bouclé suits redolent of the original Chanel. (Browne’s collection was, after all, winking at the era of Coco’s fashion debut.) There were also some astonishing,sui generislooks that featured hand-done geometric pleats, occasionally graced by beading at the edges. The sheer work involved in creating these pieces would make it impractical for them to form the main part of any ready-to-wear collection. But the thinking that went into them felt more inventive, in the end, than that of the louder tailoring mash-ups. A little of that would have gone a longer way here. That said, Browne’s efforts did get you thinking—at a fashion show, that’s an accomplishment unto itself.
15 February 2016
Nostalgia is a powerful thing, as this season has proved. If people weren’t denouncing it, they were announcing it as their next great inspiration. Remembrance of things past has a powerful pull for fashion, where revivals of past decades are ever-spinning in ever-decreasing circles. Incidentally,Yves Saint Laurentloved a bit of Proust—there’s aLouis Vuittoncase specially made to carry his volumes currently on display at the Grand Palais, in an exhibition devoted to that brand’s storied history. Vuitton, I mean; though there’s a Saint Laurent museum just up therue.The strength of recollection was the ideaThom Browneexplored: HisFall showwas, he said, about 13 guys revisiting their gentlemen’s club of 30 years ago, maybe physically, certainly mnemonically. Hence the fact each outfit appeared in triptych: the first in rags; then a light level of distress; finally, pristine. Each featured variations on classic masculine attire—tailcoats, military overcoats, fur-trimmed chesterfields—and was topped with a bowler hat tipped eerily over the face. It wasn’t a process of disintegration, but of regeneration, returning to former glories. At the start, a pair of models whipped dust sheets off the set dressing of an old-boys’ club, including a grand chandelier, wing-back chairs, and a baker’s dozen of gilded frames.InÀ la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Proust falls into raptures over the memories evoked by a tea-dunked madeleine. There was plenty of similar food for thought at Browne’s show: involuntary memories—notions evoked unintentionally, but which are often just as powerful. As the models took their place, the perfect original facing a duo of “imperfect” counterfeits, it was easy to see shades of Dorian Gray—not just because of the color of Browne’s favorite wools. Those savaged models could be his ravaged oily portrait, whose lust for youth so reflects the system of fashion. Aren’t we all forced to witness our own decay these days? And isn’t time the one thing even the richest can’t buy? We can’t turn it back, certainly. Time was an obsession of the artist René Magritte, and there were undoubted echoes of his work in the masking bowler hats, the repetition, the empty frames.Time is something designers have oft parroted as being true luxury, especially in the last couple of years, when it’s become more and more precious. It took lots of time to make these clothes, too, which were unquestionably luxurious.
Some of the patching, distressing, and intentional wear and tearing undoubtedly made the imperfect more labor-intensive—more perfect—than the unblemished outfits. “Sometimes it’s more beautiful,” mused Browne, of the loosened pearls embroidered on a short cape and jet-embellished tailcoat.You also remembered runways from times of yore, when designers really went all-out to stage ashow, to evoke a story through their garments. There aren’t many left of that old school. Maybe times have changed; or maybe designers just don’t have very much to say, or the time to say it, in the accelerated system of the contemporary runway. Thom Browne stages a show each menswear season; he presents Pre-Fall collections and shows womenswear in barely two weeks’ time. Time is undoubtedly on his mind.Good fashion can speak on many levels. Ramble on about Oscar Wilde and Proust and Browne may blink blankly (he did to me). At its base, this show was also about an inventive way of showing engaging clothes, beautifully made, but with hidden meaning embedded in every seam. One to get nostalgic over, when you’re in remembrance of great fashion shows past.
24 January 2016
“Vintage” and “sporty” are two aesthetics that don’t typically have much to do with each other. ButThom Brownefound a way to get them talking this season, reaching back to flapper-era college prep in a collection that evolved his signature uniform look to include drop-waist pleated dresses, varsity jackets, and beaver coats. Browne’s riffs on the letterman were particularly witty: Alongside his cropped bombers in fabrications such as plastic-textured patent leather and astrakhan, he made coats and dresses that nipped at the waist thanks to a pleating technique suggestive of the iconic jacket’s elastic cuffs and waistband. A grayscale check coat in that hourglass silhouette transcended both the references, achieving a timeless, grown-up soigné.There were a good number of matter-of-fact looks here: fur-tipped melton coats; classic Thom Browne cropped blazers updated courtesy of slightly bolder shoulders and lapels; undemanding knee-length skirts in full and pencil shapes. But Browne’s playful side was much in evidence, too—his jacquards with a micro pattern of bags and shoes will surely bring a smile to any accessory lover’s face; ditto for dachshund fans, the crystal embellishments in tribute to Browne’s pup Hector. Elsewhere, Browne’s playfulness got a conceptual workout in shirtdresses comprised entirely of deconstructed button-downs. We may be seeing more of that idea come Fall, according to Browne. This collection, light on formal ambition but strong in pep, will keep the Browne clientele very happy in the meantime.
6 January 2016
It’s hard to know what to say about a collection like the oneThom Browneshowed today. Not because there’s nothing to write about—indeed, there’s so, so much—but because Browne telegraphs his messages so overtly, there’s not much room for interpretation. Browne is kind of a control freak, as designers go. You can see that in the fastidiousness of his collections—their silhouettes, their fabrications, their embellishments, their presentation. This is not a bad thing! But one of the things he wants to control is the meaning of his clothes. Which means his collections are about what they’re about—no less, and (here’s the rub) no more.In lieu of interpretation, there’s description. And as usual, Browne’s outing today was a feast for the eyes. He offered the audience a red herring in the set: Itseemed, thanks to the feet sticking out from under the bare-bones house he’d installed at the center of his runway, that there was aWizard of Oztheme afoot. You might have validated that guess in the way the collection shifted, at one point, from all-grayscale looks to ones in color. But no. The real clues were in the desks inside the house the models sat at after concluding their deliberatedéfilé, and in their little jackets and pleated skirts, and in the Japonerie motifs inscribed on those tailored pieces, in elaborate and nearly trompe l’oeil ways. Browne was riffing on the aesthetic, and the mien, of Japanese schoolgirls.C’est tout.The decoration of Browne’s looks was awe-inspiring, at the levels of both inventiveness and craft. The reiterated jackets and pleated skirts were collaged together or embroidered in ways to evoke Mount Fuji landscapes or patterns of cherry blossom or koi or Edo-style illustrations of geishas. Certain looks expanded the canvas of the clothes to include intarsia minks. Others, like the jaw-dropping ribbon-embroidered pastel sack jacket, gave a more abstract, watercolor effect. The techniques and the silhouettes varied, but a sense of uniformity prevailed—a sense Browne imparted purposefully, of course. There’s undoubtedly a pair of trousers languishing in the sales collection associated with the one Browne showed on the catwalk, but the story Browne was telling at his show was emphatically one of jackets, pleated skirts, coordinated long button-downs worn as layering pieces, and frequently, a coat. The individual garments betrayed Browne’s idiomatic sense of whimsy and wit, but as a whole, they towed a party line.
The only exception was in the finale look, a radiantly iridescent confection of floor-length layered pleats. This was the schoolmarm, and by the time she emerged from backstage, Browne had more than made his point. It’s a credit to his artistry that it was a pleasure to see it underlined.
15 September 2015
A teahouse sat in the middle of a field, surrounded by scarecrows in kimonos. Every so often, the shadows of hawks chasing sparrows raced across the ground. Then the sliding screens of the teahouse opened and four geishas emerged, spectral, monochrome, crowned by Stephen Jones' swooping, sculptural headgear. At a glacial pace, the geishas moved around the room, releasing the scarecrows from their kimonos, revealing ensembles of surpassing complexity. We were once more traveling in Thom Browne country.With his partner, Andrew Bolton, caught up in his curatorial duties for the Costume Institute's China exhibition, Browne's thoughts also turned East, but to Japan, a country that is dear to him. Its attention to detail, its respect for the artisan, and its passion for craft reflect his own ethos so closely that he felt today's collection was one of his most personal. And he finally took the long-overdue step of itemizing his outfits on a handout, like so: "Patch Pocket Sack Suit and Overcoat hand-pieced with plain weave wool, pinstripe, and wool chalkstripe fresco in Mount Fuji motif—Kimono in Mount Fuji chenille yarn jacquard." While those few lines scarcely did justice to the extraordinary work that went into the kimonos (they will be stored in the archives for an exhibition some time in the future, Browne supposed), they did at least point out that the tailored items were not embroidered or intarsia-ed. A collage of fabrics was pieced together by hand to form the image on each look. Browne used his manufacturers in Japan to do the work, the only people in the entire world whom he felt were capable of realizing his obsessive vision.Browne said that each suit did in fact tell a story, but in the broadest way. Every folkloric motif you might associate with Japan—the samurai sweeping his staff, dragons, cranes, chrysanthemums, Fuji, flying geese—was put together in tones of gray. In presentation, this soothing symphony bordered on the soporific, as the designer's models shuffled in their traditional Geta sandals and Tabi socks toward their date with destiny in the teahouse. It's a smart move on Browne's part to stage his shows at such a stately pace because it forces focus onto the craft of the clothing. And here there was more than enough craft to reward contemplation.
The models, with their white skin, black lips, pomaded hair, and tiny dark glasses, looked like a mad scientist's efforts to create a master race in an old black-and-white movie—or maybe distant relatives of David Bowie inThe Hunger.Browne seems to prefer these passive automatons as clothes hangers for his designs. While such a decision certainly emphasizes the otherworldly preciousness of his work, one could also look forward to seeing it inthisworld, living, breathing, and rippling with movement.
28 June 2015
What's more all-American than an oxford cloth button-down? That was the question Thom Browne posed to himself as he started work on his latest collection. His new clothes offered an extended riff on the material, one that started out relatively straightforward, with looks in multiple colors of the fabric, and zigged and zagged all over the place, as Browne bounced off both the fabric's washed-out palette and its ur-preppy connotations. There were a few simple, strong ideas, like the coats made from a stiff, double-weight oxford cloth and the button-down shirtdresses with pleated skirts. Browne's pastel-toned tweeds, cotton cashmere waffle knits, and pieces in a Japanese school uniform plaid likewise had a very direct appeal.Naturally, though, there were more idiosyncratic looks on offer, like a scarf skirt in a primary-colored fish print, or a double-breasted blazer and matching miniskirt patchworked out of wool crepe, pleated silk, rubberized tweed, and floral jacquard. The palette of the latter was subdued enough to make the look go down easy, despite the density of visual and textural information. Some of the nicest touches were subtle ones—Browne softened the shoulder of various jackets, tops, and dresses by affixing a bias-cut sleeve, and there was a similarly relaxed quality to his update on his signature cropped sack trouser, which came in versions with a looser leg this season.Elsewhere, contrast fringe served as nice punctuation on various looks, notably the cotton oxford cloth pieces that formed the heart of this collection. Browne carried the fringe embellishment through to waffle knits and standard wool mohair tailoring; that was one of several ways that he created a sense of continuity. For all its longueurs—and this was a collection that started with oxford cloth and wound its way to luxe, tropical-scene jacquards—this outing did feel coherent. Browne is a discursive designer, but as he proved again this season, he's always in full command of the story he's telling.
8 June 2015
It's curious how many of Thom Browne's shows begin with protagonists in a deep, immobilizing sleep. You might think everything that follows is taking place in a languid dream state. Tonight was no exception. In a set that could have been borrowed from Steven Soderbergh'sThe Knick, blond beauties slumbered in a state of living death, lovingly tended to by gilded male angels, until they were awakened by the touch of a glamorous black-clad Grim Reaper. It was just the kind of dislocating, time-stretching gambit with which Browne loves to set his scene.But if that was business as usual, the rest of the performance took Browne to places he'd never been before. A black denim miniskirt? With zips? And Chelsea boots? That look alone was almost enough to establish this collection's credentials as Browne's most youthful and accessible to date. But miraculously, as contemporary as it was, it also amplified the story Browne was telling—or maybe the movie he was making in his mind. Like his men's show in January, this one was inspired byDeath Becomes Her, the Metropolitan Museum's exhibition of mourning clothes from the 19th century. The inspiration was more potent in this context, because young widows were held in such peculiar regard at that time. Sexually seasoned, yet unattached by circumstance, they must have posed a threat to a social order that was dictated by allegiance to wives and families. A zippered miniskirt could be construed as the modern embodiment of such a threat.OK, there we go on the kind of tangent that Browne's collections can induce in the fancifully inclined. But this was one time when it felt like fun to really,reallygo there. His soundtrack was a lengthy track from Björk's new album, mourning the death of a relationship. Browne's sleeping beauties were dead of a broken heart. The black-clad, fishnet-stockinged harpies who moved glacially through the set were the kind of creatures who would revenge those poor shattered souls. And the clothes that Browne gave them had a luxurious, linear quality that was new for the designer, because it was so strong and straightforward. Even in a guipure lace coat trimmed in black mink, or a portrait-shouldered coat dress in moiré mink intarsia, or a horsehair-trimmed coat in embroidered PVC, or a cable-knit astrakhan.
In other words, the fabrics were as exquisitely intangible as they always are in a Thom Browne collection, with the distinct difference that they were cut into outfits that were almost fiercely direct.Browne loves black-and-white movies, especially when they're silent: old Charlie Chaplin films, Fritz Lang'sMetropolis. The opulent fantasia of monochrome tone and texture he offered tonight was as close to film as anything he's ever shown before. It was enough to make you wonder when the catwalk will no longer be enough to contain his dreams.
16 February 2015
Next week, the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum in New York shuts down its current exhibition,Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire. After Thom Browne read about the show, he wouldn't let himself see it. The title was inspiration enough. And he didn't want anyone from his atelier to go, either—no preconceptions as they all approached the new collection.For Browne, the concept of mourning conveyed something beautiful, romantic, rich. "I had a notion of how there is respect for people who have passed," he said after tonight's theatrical performance. So he came up with a scenario about a character named Michael, a self-contained individual who lives and dies in complete harmony with himself, and is then honored in death by his friends and relatives.Bizarre? Macabre? This was a Thom Browne show. How could we expect anything more or less? We watched patiently as a white-clad Michael (best imagine him played by Anthony Perkins) rose from his bed, went about a minimal routine—suggestive, at least to this mind, of preparation for suicide—changed into a black suit, converted his pristine white surroundings to black, reversing even his pillow and duvet, then got back into bed…and died. Now the mourners arrived: the lawyer, the doctor, the siblings, the ex-lovers, the dowager aunts, the undertakers—who knows how many more? Handel's Sarabande provided a mournful soundtrack. Fashion's ADD pulse slowed to a standstill. Did I mention patience?It's true that death inspired reactions different to our own in the not-so-distant past. It was that spirit that Browne sought. "I didn't want it to be sad, or too deep," he said. That's why preppy icons—the whale, the turtle—appeared to leaven the funereal proceedings. And, this being a fashion show after all, there were plenty of clothes that had applications above and beyond the morbid tableau unfolding in front of us. A black leather car coat? A fur-trimmed peacoat? An exceptionally glamorous jacket in what looked like glazed python? There was also Browne's customary, exhaustive catalog of jacket and coat options, in an ingenious combination of masculine and feminine fabrics. The fact that they were all shown in black undoubtedly would have enhanced our appreciation of their cuts if we hadn't been so distanced from them.
There is surely significance in the fact that Rei Kawakubo and Thom Browne opted for such ceremonial presentations in the same season (and Walter Van Beirendonck and Craig Green, come to think of it). If fashion is a mirror, it has, overall, been dark throughout the European menswear shows, reflecting the world in which the shows have been taking place. The fact that Browne all but brought the calendar to a close in Paris with a funeral made the point even stronger. As usual, he contested the suggestion of a bigger picture. Romance, richness—these were his tentpoles. But he closed his show with a rain of black ash.
25 January 2015
As a woman, it's hard not to look at men's wardrobes with a sense of envy now and then. How nice it must be, you think, to have a uniform. Not to face down each day with that open-ended question: What should I wear? And yet, more often, women envy one another for the playful variety of their clothing options. This uniform-versus-variety circle was the one Thom Browne was trying to square last season, as he proposed his own Monday-to-Friday looks for gals. Here, he elaborated on the idea, which seems less like a seasonal concept than a solid modus operandi for his brand. Pre-Fall found the designer extrapolating menswear tailoring, as is his wont, into feminine shapes, with the focus on two silhouettes: a loose one based on the classic sack suit, and one sharp-shouldered with a nipped waist. Both achieved their finest form in Browne's luxe outerwear—a mink-tipped tweed Chesterfield coat, on the one hand, and belted cashmere or jacquard coats on the other, their trim waists flattered by natty belts and a skirt-like flare.Elsewhere, Browne's cardigan-inspired shifts nicely fulfilled the uniform brief—they had a no-brainer sense of ease. Ditto his excellent broadcloth and oxford shirting, a category the designer is keen to emphasize. Suit jackets paired with high-water trousers or A-line skirts of "awkward length," to quote Browne, had a narrower, more eccentric appeal. The real fun of this collection, though, was its fabrics and, relatedly, its flourishes: That was the variety side of the equation, in effect. The tweeds here were pretty extraordinary, especially the ones woven with threads of paper or rubber, and the tie jacquards had the kind of weight one associates with the royal vestments found in museums. Same goes for the silk braid trim, one of this outing's key embellishments. Still, the overall tone was restrained, a quality reflected in the collection's mainly neutral palette. Browne is known—and celebrated—for his flights of fancy, but his strategy of designing a weekly uniform seems to have grounded him in a good way. These clothes didn't feel basic—the usual outcome of designers approaching uniformity. But they did feel real.
5 January 2015
Just when you thought there was no longer any way to spin the ludicrous extravagance of a Thom Browne show, the man turned the game upside down with a collection whose paradoxical marriage of restraint and excess produced a genuine,Stone Gon'fashion moment. The restraint was in the silhouettes: a trouser suit, a jacket and flaring skirt, a coat—all straightforward, untroubled by Browne's yen to de- and reconstruct. The excess was in the fabrics: gorgeous, multidimensional assaults on reason. But, because they were contained within a comprehensible, familiar frame, they entranced rather than perplexed. It was the smartest move Browne has ever made—it spotlighted his skill, rather than his willfulness.Nevertheless, itisthat willfulness that shapes Browne's personality as a designer. His audience today encountered a verdantly scented, box-hedged lawn set withtableaux vivants, each a surreal summation of summer pursuits—sunbathing, sailing, shuttlecock, butterfly collecting—with models uncomfortably frozen in poses, which seemed like a perfect paradigm for Browne's uptight aesthetic. A bowler-hatted gardener in a seersucker shorts suit and fishnet stockings mowed the lawn. So far, so Browne. But then the voice of Diane Keaton began to intone the tale of six obsessive sisters on the soundtrack while models walked in illustration, and a peculiar magic took the audience in its sway.It was an extraordinary performance. Browne's coconspirator was master milliner Stephen Jones, who artfully created headgear to specifically complement each outfit (more than 30 hats in all, an entire summer of work for Jones and his atelier). The whole exercise stemmed from Browne's request for a turban, which reminded Jones of something he'd once conjured up in the '80s by twisting a T-shirt on the head of singer Kate Garner. The wit, thecraft, of every hat was like the genius of the collection writ small.And that genius was Browne's. Obsession can alienate—there are enough instances of that in the designer's past to offer as proof—but here it enthralled. One dress woven fromfishing line(!) was trimmed in mink (Jones made a tiny jacket/hat to match). A jacket in dégradé colored oxford cloth was composed of 180 separate pieces. A coat throbbed with what looked like lenticular striping. A jigsaw of Mylar leather encased a perfectly acceptable cocktail dress. It was the stuff of a sci-fi fashion fairy tale. And yet it was also remarkably (for Browne at least) accessible.
There were any number of pieces that could have stepped straight off the grassy catwalk and onto the steamy asphalt of the street outside. That felt like a breakthrough for Browne, which also meant that, at last, his extreme, eccentric showmanship yielded unambiguous dividends.
8 September 2014
Thom Browne's Fall scenario—the hunter and the hunted—could also be read as man against nature. And it had an ending that could be construed as happy. "The animals prevail," said Browne at the time. This season, the elaborately staged competition was between man and machine. "They all lose in the end," was Browne's cheery summation this time round. That makes man a two-time loser. Has Browne got something against guys? Legions of the Unconvinced would cast their eyes over his designs and come to that conclusion, so…er…idiosyncraticis his approach to menswear. But connoisseurs of his oeuvre would see instead a radical, experimental revision of the male form. It's almost as though Browne has been making a new man for himself. He's fashion's Dr. Frankenstein, with all the idealism and horror that implies.Utopia and dystopia: Browne in a nutshell. Today, they came together in a collection that, he claimed, took inspiration fromTRON, the 1982 sci-fi stinker that became a cult. Ahead of its time, actually, with its life-is-a-video-game story. Browne isn't really a video game kind of guy. More likely little Thom was glued to the puppet fantasiaThunderbirds, with the young heroes of International Rescue thronging round Lady Penelope in her pink Rolls-Royce. The models with their perfectly sculpted plastic masks, articulated stiffness, and jaunty caps did indeed look eerily like International Rescue. Like puppets, in other words.The scenario was this: Browne's arena was filled with a field of human statuary, 23rd-century robots patrolled by guards bearing lightsabers. Around this compound paced two antagonistic tribes: one sculpted from human anatomy stripped to its elemental musculature, the other all points and spikes and pixilated definition (the ghost of Klaus Nomi hovering over the compound). The fun was, as usual, in plumbing Browne's intent. Yes, he was enjoying molding classic American fabrics like seersucker, tweed, and cotton into anatomical show-and-tells. But how could he alchemize this obsessively realized, minutely detailed (sixty to eighty pattern pieces in each jacket!) compendium of all-but-couture techniques into a collection of clothes that would bring men to their hind legs in appreciation? Why bother? The robots who sat motionless for hours while the fancy-pants paraded around them were the ones wearing the classically cut and fabricated clothing that would most likely end up in stores.
In the end, it felt a bit like we'd been snookered by a master magician. Magic relies on distraction. Color this crowddistracted.
28 June 2014
"You know those really ugly gerbera daisy floral arrangements they sell at the deli? You know how you see those and wonder,Who buys those?Well, I bought them." Thus did Thom Browne explain the genesis of his expansive, posy-filled collection. Browne elaborated on his floral theme in every way he could think of, creating flowery prints, hand-painted knits, and dense silk jacquards, not to mention a variety of three-dimensional floral embroideries that were a highlight of the collection. A jacket covered in multicolor crocheted flowers was truly extraordinary, and a black-and-white silk sheath, constructed from flat panels, got a jolt of sweetness from fluttery floral appliqué. The latter was a relatively pared-down look; in general, Browne's proposition was to mix up his exuberant florals as much as possible. It wasn't wall-to-wall botany, though. Other collection standouts were the mid-weight tweeds, in particular the cotton version in signature Thom Browne red-white-and-blue tones knitted into a fitted jacket and matching pleated skirt. There was quite a bit to like here, in fact—even a woman wary of Browne's eccentricities would find it hard to miss the appeal of a high-waisted A-line skirt in a gaudy floral silk jacquard. Browne showed that piece with a hand-painted floral polo and a navy jacket in a different, multicolor floral print. But he's a fan of muchness. One wonders what might happen if he took inspiration from the bodega cat.
8 June 2014
It began with a bolt of vintage gold lamé from the 1920s. Where that fabric might have suggested showbiz to some, to good Catholic boy Thom Browne it instantly evoked the ecclesiastical. Leaving aside for one moment the fact that the competition for ownership of souls places Hollywood and the Vatican in a neck-and-neck race, Browne's irresistible attraction to showmanship inevitably produced a show that turned blind faith into a Fellini-esque spectacle, complete with a soundtrack from the maestro's ownRoma. It was pitched to a repetitive point where the audience, seated in pews and swamped in incense, would have confessed toanythingto make the music stop.Blessed or damned? You're never sure with Thom Browne. Every model's fingertips were dipped in black. It's freaky flourishes like this that can make his shows feel like an entire season ofAmerican Horror Storyrolled into fifteen fashion minutes. But maybe such thoughts were encouraged here by the way that an exaggerated Mae West silhouette was infused with a fetishized religiosity. The hyper-rounded shapes said Diamond Lil, the monochrome solemnity of the clothes spoke of piety. "Sister Mary Gabriel says turn away from sin," Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark intoned at the finale. Maybe that was the journey we had been watching on the catwalk, as a shapely strumpet made her way into the gilded eye of God.And yet, utter excess was woven into the very fiber of the collection. Irresistible as it was to interpret this as Browne's sly comment on the extravagance of the church, it also fitted too well into his own obsession with layer after layer of detail to be so easily pinned down. The way, for example, that his signature gray flannel was hemmed in silver, or a tweed jacket was laminated with gold was a transmutation of the banal. Every fabric was opulently treated in some way, from dévoré to embossing to bugle beading. Exhausting but hypnotic. A similar result, in fact, to that which the church seeks from its faithful with its heady rituals. For Thom Browne, fashion is the new church.
9 February 2014
More art installation than fashion show backdrop, the set for Thom Browne's show today was a Disney woodland populated with dozens of cute critters. A bear posed on a rock, ducks and fish swam in a pinstripe river, rabbits and squirrels scurried, an eagle soared above. The kicker? Three months in the making, the entire tableau, flora and fauna included, was stitched from classic menswear fabrics.The show itself was a performance in two acts: the hunted and the hunters. For the first, Stephen Jones created a stunning set of headgear to represent the animal kingdom—from a helmet with frog's eyes and a cap whose peak came to the hardened point of an eagle's beak, to a bear head holding a fish in its mouth, to a huge elephant mask. The clothes that went with them were as accessible as anything Browne has ever offered, deliberately so. He was so excited to be working with Jones he wanted to showcase the hats, so the tweed, herringbone, glen plaid, houndstooth, windowpane check, and gray flannel tailoring was designed to steal no thunder (though perhaps the raw seams were an acknowledgement of the wild animal within). This first section offered a shred of insight into how Browne posted a 61 percent increase in menswear sales last year. Somewhere there is asemi-real world in which you could imagine these clothes moving.The second act, however, was a very different story. Welcome back to Thomlandia, asur-real world where logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead. Browne's hunters moved like demented Pierrots, exposing just how encumbered they were by their capelets of intarsia-ed mink, their dense honeycomb brocades woven with neoprene and digital pixels, strewn with sequins and giant oak leaves. Physical bulk aside, there was a perverseflatnessto these outfits, like Browne had borrowed a leaf from Rei Kawakubo's bible of two-dimensionality. They were so stiff that there was at least one instance—the huge plastic waders—where the model had to be lowered into his look. There was something so willfully bravura about such ridiculous excess that one was left fishing—as usual—for analogies outside the world of conventions as banal as usefulness, ease of movement, sex appeal…Didn't Nijinsky once do something so two-dimensional that he was practically stoned out of the theater?Back to earth with a bump…the faces of Browne's boys were stenciled with oak leaves to blend in with their outfits. Blend? Yes, that was the point of it all.
Browne's career has been built on a fascination with the classic, and here he was celebrating the primacy of camouflage in the male fashion lexicon. Or sohesaid. A more poignant subtext was the one suggested by the finale, where the "hunter" models stood in front of the "hunted" models, obscuring them. Then the "hunted" models moved up front. "The animals prevail," said Browne. Showman, optimist,andconservationist? See for yourself when Browne's entire Fall 2014 shebang goes on show at a gallery near you. Because that is the likeliest destination for this epic spectacle.
18 January 2014
Forgive a bad joke: This season, Thom Browne turned over a new leaf. That was true in the most literal sense, as Browne introduced both leaf-shaped jewelry, made in collaboration with Sarah Jane Wilde, and a leaf-patterned jacquard that Browne said was his take on camouflage. (It was interesting to imagine the background a woman wearing Brownes snug, red-blue-and-white-leaf jacquard coat might be hoping to blend into, but anyway.) Moreover, you could say that Browne was turning over a new leaf metaphorically, as well, since this collection found him doing quite a bit of tinkering with his tailoring.Many of the looks here featured curved seams or spiral construction, like the flared and pencil-fit dresses composed of pieces of tie silk helixed around the body. Elsewhere, Browne gave his suiting a twist by dropping the shoulder of a blazer, or working plaid knits in the same way he would have done a bouclé or a tweed. The effect of all this experimentation was idiosyncratic but not inaccessible; the styling was quirkier overall than any of the silhouettes. It was easy to lose sight of the high-toned elegance of some of these looks, like the silver velvet coat with a shaved mink collar, which was an evening topper with a high glamour quotient, indeed. You might also be tempted to lodge the complaint that it would be hard to imagine the girl wearing the rugby-striped knit miniskirt and V-neck set also being the woman who wears that silver coat, but then, as Whitman famously asserted, we all contain multitudes. Maybe he wrote that inLeaves of Grass?
6 January 2014
Naked lightbulbs flickered against the backdrop of a padded cell as a monotonously plinking xylophone soundtracked an interminable delay that pushed the assembled throng to the brink of madness. Then came the show itself, a handful of wayward and difficult associations that toyed with insanity: Bette Davis' Baby Jane; Heath Ledger's Joker; the Asylum story arc ofAmerican Horror Story; noir goddess Gloria Grahame disfigured by Lee Marvin inThe Big Heat; renegade star Frances Farmer torn apart by her brutal and involuntary electroshock therapy; a society lady institutionalized for strangling the family pets with her string of pearls; papier-mâché keeping lunatic fingers busy. Let no one say that Thom Browne makes things easy for his audience.And yet this was hardly McQueen's profoundly disturbing glass cage. Instead, it was a bare smirk away from cartoon. Browne has mastered a peculiar species of Broadway couture. The workmanship is dazzling but numbing in its obsessive detail. The fabrics are the stuff of fairy tales. You crave a show tune to bring it all to vibrant life, especially when Browne is almost Warholian in his steadfast refusal to impart the weight of metaphor—let alone intimately personal subtext—to presentations that are so heavily weighted with weirdness. An Elizabethan silhouette? Well, thatreallyspeaks to the here and now. But Browne would at least admit Judi Dench as Elizabeth I inShakespeare in Lovemight have had something to do with his fascination with ruffs, elaborate shoulders, leg-of-mutton sleeves, funnels, whorls, and sculpted plissés of fabric. (These were located, one might add, above erogenous zones, meaning it was not just weird but sexual—sort of.) It is, after all, manipulation of form that is Browne's design signature.Here, it was sharpest in the slashed latex sheathes that confined extravagant collages of zibeline and lace and silk. How the designer could deny the subtext inthatparticularly graphic image defies comprehension. But there was another question that demanded more immediate resolution. If it's an asylum cliché that men imagine themselves as Napoleon, do women see themselves as Elizabeth I?
8 September 2013
Thom Browne has wanted to do a military collection for a while. He waited patiently while the rest of fashion flirted with the idea. Camo everywhere. Then he came across the École Militaire in Paris, which looks more like the Palace of Versailles than a military academy. Eureka! Thom got in touch with his inner Private Browne.That inner being resides in a place where it is clearly impossible for the rest of us to go. As much as his shows defy conventional analysis, Browne himself is an enigma. The show today was yet another of his polarizing exercises in showmanship. The best? The worst? Proselytizers for both points of view could be found. The story the collection told could be summed up by a gimlet eye as "Joan Crawford goes to West Point." So broad-shouldered, so full-skirted, so ready to serve her country.There's the bitterest irony in such a twisted interpretation. It was ameliorated by the scale and consistency of Browne's vision. A toy soldier—lips painted, cheeks rouged, jumpsuit flag-wavingly red, white, 'n' blue—marched robotically down the arcades of the École Militaire, then stood guard in a mirrored box lined with toile de Jouy while his compadres walked past in clothes that were scarcely less Ruritanian.Ruritanian? Maybe too benign a reference for clothes that were touched with the macabre. The ambiguity of Browne's figurines evoked the queeny drama of Helmut Berger's cross-dressing Nazi in Luchino Visconti'sThe Damned. But it could also be read as a comment on gays in the military. Or maybe a satire of militarism in general. Browne himself chose not to illuminate the subtext. "I love uniforms and this has been on my mind for a while," he said in his typically unassuming way.There is always a commercial collection back in the showroom that boils the showpieces down to accessibility, but in this case, it was hard to see how a corset-laced vinyl coat with flaring skirts could possibly translate into the real world. Maybe the rouged generalissimo who walked the runway at show's end with a 20-foot train in a monochrome black-and-white stars and stripes pattern was a dream client. Dream? Or nightmare!
29 June 2013
Thom Browne, tailor. If the man hung a shingle, that's the one he'd hang. (Though he's always quick to credit his tailoring mentor, Rocco Ciccarelli, with whom he developed his trademark silhouettes.) Browne's women's collection is no less beholden to tailoring than his men's. It's the raison d'être. So, following up a Fall show that brought more eyes to his women's line than ever before, Browne doubled down. He's so confident of his tailoring that he literally turned it inside out. "Sometimes the inside of a jacket is as beautiful as the outside," he said. Inside-outer-y is not new for fashion; provocateurs have been doing it for years. But Browne comes by it honestly, and he wrung a nice balance out of the ploy, between the rigidity of his exposed seams and the cobwebby threads that dangled off several of the pieces.What's more, there was a comelier femininity at play than has often been evident before. Browne bristled slightly at the assertion that his womenswear hasn't always had that element, but at least where his shows are concerned, he's often kept things in a dark, theatrical realm. Here the pads and puffs were dispensed with. A tweed skirtsuit with a belted Norfolk jacket and hand-painted tights was positively flirty. And a sleek coatdress shown with a heavy leather belt—its hardware matched that on the bags—had three sharp slits at the back.Sexy!was on the tip of your tongue. And then the man himself cut in: "Like gills!"
10 June 2013
When Michelle Obama wore a Thom Browne coat and dress to her husband's inauguration, she sent the world a clear message:Thom Browne makes womenswear!Yes sirree, the designer who has famously built a career on re-proportioning gray flannel suits for men garbs the lady of the White House as well. But anyone who came to Browne's latest presentation expecting more Michelle-ready pieces would have been flummoxed. His shows have always offered Browne an opportunity to indulge the most twisted fissures of his creative self. He just can't help himself. So his audience today was greeted by a scenario studded with Gray Flannel Guys stretched out on army cots, wearing crowns of thorns, wrists bound in red ribbon. That's the way opera represents blood. And it was an operatic kind of day. The Pope quit. It was the third anniversary of Alexander McQueen's suicide. If Browne has always been determinedly, even defiantly, sui generis in his work, the outside world was tapping at his window today.That can't be a bad thing. If you could choose just one critique to hurl Browne's way, it would be that his tiny patch of fashion is as hermetically sealed as Tim Burton's mini-verse of gothic grotesque. In fact, the hair and makeup of the models today vaguely echoed Burton's Red Queen inAlice in Wonderland.And, once again, Browne took us down his very own rabbit hole. It was a place of intense discipline, silhouettes strictly defined, fabrics classically sober as a judge, with the hardly minor caveat that both were exaggerated to surreal degrees. There was an obvious fashion precedent in Christian Dior's New Look, but consummately controlling Hollywood ball-breakers like Joan Crawford and Babs Stanwyck felt like a more appropriate correlative. Browne pulled off a Hitchcockian masterstroke by unhinging their control with the implied chaos of random tatters of lace and splatters of white paint across shoes and bags. (If there was a pornographic subtext in that last flourish, it only amplified Browne's peculiar ability to evoke uncomfortable associations.)Postshow (and post-Obama), Browne was insistent that the image he was offering on his catwalk was one of female power. And he wasn't wrong. The men's show he presented in Paris a few weeks ago was all about building something. His woman today was powerful—and unhinged—enough to tear that building down.
Given Browne's longtime predilection for perversity, his real-time message this time might actually be quite simple: Girls, it's time to man up.
10 February 2013
Thom Browne was born in Pennsylvania, home to the Amish, memorable for a barn-building sequence in Harrison Ford's boffo 1985 movieWitness. Thom wanted some barn-building for his men's show in Paris today, but hammers, nails, and male models were a bridge too far for the local authorities, so he had to compromise with said models robotically, infuriatingly banging at a wooden house frame for the duration of his presentation. They were clad in Browne's classic gray flannel suits, the significance of which will be revealed shortly.The designer's surreal scenarios always have some internal logic, a movie, perhaps, or an art moment he has dredged up from his memory. While you're watching Browne's shows though, it is much easier—and much more fun—to submerge yourself in a warm sea of free association. The house his "builders" were constructing today was the meeting place for men clad in his latest collection, who, in their sinister eyewear and signature down-the-rabbit-hole Browne-wear, looked like alien infiltrators of the stolid here and now, kin perhaps to the Strangers fromDark Cityor the Observers fromFringe. The fact that the hammerers had to blindfold themselves while the beings were in the house only compounded the sense that an eldritch cabal was convening before our very eyes.Hey, ease up, honcho. It's just a fashion show. Or was it? Browne's designs have never been clothes as we know them, and yet there was a peculiar familiarity to these outfits. Some of them—especially the ecclesiastical, men-in-dresses aspect—came from his presentations in the past, but there were also quilted pieces and substantial outerwear that aligned the collection with the mood of the moment. And if one of the concerns of the season has been silhouette, Browne surely offered the very last word onthatwith his Pixar-sized exaggerations. But after the show, he offered a more telling rationale for his exercises in excess. They're all in the service of that gray flannel suit—the shows are gaudy bejeweled fantasias that highlight the humble gold ring in their midst. Lovely notion.
19 January 2013
Thom Browne is still best known as a menswear designer, and the fundamentals of menswear are channeled through his clothes for women as well. Any lady on the hunt for the perfect, tailored, gray flannel blazer will have no trouble finding it here. But what was notable in Browne's womenswear collection this season was its outright femininity: Everywhere you looked, pretty much, there were curves. Though Browne's wasp-waist silhouettes were a far sight more traditional than the ones he showed last season, he went at them with verve, putting a broad full skirt on a dress made from panels of classic necktie jacquard, and cutting a cascade of draped ruffles in another skirt of gray wool. Sharp shoulders and jackets tailored corset-tight further articulated the shape. The collection's strongest and most enduring looks, however, were much more relaxed. Browne nailed pre-fall's oversize coat trend, producing a few versions of mannish overcoats that were big without being sloppy or surreal. Indeed, after his madcap Spring '13 outing, this was a circumspect affair, with a muted palette of neutrals, and most of the action happening close up, in intriguing materials such as quilted ripstop nylon and tweed woven through with rubber yarn.
10 January 2013
There was madness afoot in the New York Public Library today: hypno-wheels and crazy mirrors, male mannequins made up as the 1931 version of Dr. Frankenstein, ballerinas spinning like music-box dancers to Krzysztof Penderecki, whose avant-garde atonality soundtracked classic creepshowsThe ExorcistandThe Shining.Sound like a Thom Browne show? Why, you're absolutely right. But, for the very first time, Browne made the method in his madness perfectly clear when he owned up to an influence. It's something he's always shied away from in the past, allowing commentators to project their own bemused interpretations onto his elaborate fashion fantasias. Today, however, Browne name-checked Oskar Schlemmer, the German artist who worked under the umbrella of the Bauhaus.One of Schlemmer's theatrical specialties was living sculptures, particularly stylized female figures. Browne has often treated the body as architecture. Among his own favorites in his new collection were the first looks, given a geometric edge with the use of neoprene. The Bauhaus ethos prevailed in pieces shaped, elongated, and stiffened into sculptural forms. As the palette passed from 1920s monochrome into 1950s Technicolor, the clothes became more patterned, more ornate, candy-fied, like the lollipop encrustations on collars and cuffs. It was almost a relief to return to somber black and white as the male models stepped forward to revolve Browne's women on those hypno-wheels as though they were carnival automatons.Even given Browne's evocation of Schlemmer's Bauhaus cabaret, there was still ample room for bemused interpretation. All that hypnosis flimflam was a tidy metaphor for the hypnotic power of fashion. It took a darker turn when the men manipulated the women on their turntables.Thatsuggested the classic male dominance scenario: Svengali using hypnosis to control Trilby in George du Maurier's 1894 novel. Then there were the preppy motifs that have always littered Browne's clothes. Here, he used whales and seahorses, but he rendered them as beautiful little skeletons too. Moby Dead? The end of prep? Saying nothing, Browne smiled a knowing smile.His final outfit was a wedding dress on its own leash. Penderecki was replaced on the soundtrack by "Wuthering Heights," Kate Bush's paean to a woman driven crazy by love. At the end of it all, madness.
9 September 2012
Lookbooks lie. The images you see accompanying this review are the most pallid record imaginable of the remarkable presentation that Thom Browne staged in a Parisian garden square for his Spring 2013 menswear.For all its flaws, Ridley Scott'sPrometheusis a movie as primed for impact on fashion as his earlier masterpieceBlade Runner. Unfortunately for that theory, Browne hasn't seen the film. Still, there was a mythological component in his show that seemed a little bigger than your average clever staging. The mythology of fashion? Delightful thought. On arrival, guests were greeted by a greensward covered with neat lines of rather large silver brogues. So far, so anal, in the Browne tradition. But when the garden was invaded by huge silvery insectoid satyrs, like escapees fromPan's Labyrinth, past predictabilities evaporated. After the satyrs had worked their macabre magic, an army of giant Slinkys shuffled into the garden to boing-boing electronica (Doctor Whofans could have visualized Daleks as an alternative). Each one of them settled over the silver shoes like a broody king penguin. When the Slinky dropped, a model was revealed in an outfit from Browne's new collection. So transporting had been the setup that it took a moment to remember that clothes were, after all, the point of all this.And, amazingly, they matched their intro. It was still Browne's silhouette—outré layering and cropping—but the palette had shifted from Calvinist sobriety to preppy-on-acid. Candy-colored ginghams and madras, beaded lobster appliqués, whale-print trousers, knee socks—Browne's vision transported into a parallel universe and given a delirious spin. It was a wise, and necessary, move. All those signature items suddenly took on a new lease of life.But a comprehensive appreciation of Browne's madness would have to take into account the fact that the silvery goat pants worn by the satyrs were branded with the designer's signature tricolor tag. As in, they might also be in the collection. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
30 June 2012
That Thom Browne—who lives to provoke and feeds on runway spectacle—is debuting a Resort collection (typically sales-driven and unshowy) is a bit of cognitive dissonance striking enough to be measurable on the Richter scale. The tremors don't abate when you learn that Thom took as his theme "classic resort" and the totems of prep. Rest easy. Though Resort is a commercial collection, Browne promised, "I never look at anything commercially." The purpose, he said, was to introduce themes he'd continue in September (and, before then, in his men's show in Paris in July).Besides, what is anything so enshrined as resortwear and preppiedom but fertile ground for the usual Brownean subversion? A foamy cotton jacquard covered with whales was the sort of thing you might see in a Lilly Pulitzer catalog. Until, that is, you look closer and discover that some of the whales are actually whale bones and carcasses. Joining the whales (and their remains) were floral jacquards, crayon-colored madras, and embroidered lace, fashioned into modest skirts and worn under printed silk peignoirs or Browne's signature tailored jackets. (His "school uniform" jackets, for the record, are made in a Japanese fabric that is used for most of the standard-issue uniforms for actual Japanese schoolchildren.) The custom-developed fabrics made their way into accessories, too, from structured bags to scarves to pumps (the last worn with matching, hand-knit socks in piqué), and for the first time, the designer added women's frames to his licensed sunglass line. You'd have to admit that the whole looked, if slightly daft in the usual and appealing Thom Browne way, quite wearable. Browne promised more theatrics come September. And in the meantime, there were touches of wildness, like the madras sun hat whose diameter rivaled the rings of Saturn. But provocative though he may be, Browne is no mere provocateur. The hat would be produced, he promised, and if experience was any teacher, would sell.
11 June 2012
Jeff Buckley hymned "Hallelujah" on the soundtrack, while flickering candles barely illuminated a wood-paneled room in which ten coffins had been arranged in a row. They held the bodies of "ten beautiful girls who died for fashion," according to the gray-suited female rector who introduced the scenario.No one could ever say Thom Browne is incapable of setting a scene. In the past, once he'd done that, he proved himself perfectly capable of sailing on into extremes scarcely logical. The boldness-bordering-on-lunacy of such an approach has exposed him to ridicule time and again. Admittedly, today's spectacle of a roomful of coffins was scarcely encouraging. But wonders never cease in the merry-go-round world of fashion. Browne's scenario called for his victims to be reanimated by their love of fashion. They clambered out of their coffins and stood sentinel-like while models meandered around them. So far, so macabre. But the notion of rebirth actually worked in a deeply metaphorical way, because what Browne showed was far and away his most convincing women's collection to date.In fact, it touched on emotions his often contrived work has never plumbed. It may be as simple as this: These gilded, ethereal clothes were felt, not thought.For one thing, there were none of the gratuitous volumes that Browne is so attached to. Elegant elongation ruled, with the emphasis on a narrow waist. Exaggerated peplums and bustles heightened that emphasis. Although the designer insists he is absolutely influence-proof, there were inescapable echoes of haute couture's golden age in such silhouettes. Same with a pleated cocoon, or sack-backed dresses. Then there were architectural constructs, with swoops of fabric that suggested the more outré reaches of classic couture. A mink bolero, sparkly tweeds, and fur-trimmed camel were ingredients in a headily luxe stew.The one element that most obviously harked back to Browne's past indulgences was the body modification. The designer exaggerated any point where the body naturally protuded—shoulder, elbow, knee, breast. It was that kind of flourish that made Rei Kawakubo a point of reference. But the soundtrack, drawn from Tim Burton movies, was maybe more relevant. The arena in which Thom Browne operates isn't fashion, it's the same rich, private world of fantasy that Burton explores on-screen. The world needn't be what it is, the designer says. And here's the proof.
12 February 2012
Thom Browne's explanations for his warped spectacles are always so even-toned and reasonable that they can make an interrogator feel likehe'sthe one who has plunged down the rabbit hole into a topsy-turvy world where logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead (as the Jefferson Airplane's Grace Slick once memorably described her own experience in Wonderland). Tonight, for instance, Browne described a scenario where Punks face off against Jocks. It was almost high school in its commonplaceness. But what did he do with the inspiration? OK, here goes:Road Warrior,Rocky Horror,Blade Runner,The Longest Yard,Despicable Me,The Incredibles. Oh, and a jacket and skirt that, had they been paired with pearls, would have draggedThe Iron Ladyonto the men's catwalks of Paris.Browne has always maintained he loves to entertain, to bring a smile to the face of his audience. True, there was merriment to be extracted from the mink merkins that poked cheekily out of the Punks' low-slung pants, but tonight's quarterbacks in cashmere were hardly figures of fun. With their heads mounted on huge shoulders, they looked like trophies. Or, with their grotesquely exaggerated musculature, like Doctor Frankenstein's latest creations. The doctor's output is popularly cast in a sinister light, and there was something of that in Browne's work, too. As with Walter Van Beirendonck's show yesterday, the cartoon colors and proportions came across as the candy coating on a profoundly transgressive vision. And the shadowed oeuvre of Robert Mapplethorpe made its presence felt again in references to bondage (the spiked leather mask, for instance) and a final frozen tableau of dominance and submission that recalled one of the photographer's most famous images.As Browne saw it, his seriousness of purpose came through in his proportion play. The Punks stood for a tailoring much skinnier than anything he's ever attempted before. The Jocks were obviously steroid time bombs waiting to explode, but deflate that silhouette and there were a lot of the sort of patrician, Waspy pieces that Browne toys with, like an orca with a seal. There was also a suit that duplicated a Christmas snowflake pattern in red beading on white wool. It looked so innocent in context that you fell on it with a grateful sigh.
21 January 2012
At his womenswear show today, the customary weirdness of Thom Browne's presentations took on a macabre note, like a brittle murder-mystery weekend in a country house sealed off from the real world, where all manner of naughtiness was free to let fly. Even the soundtrack encouraged it. "Let's Misbehave," peeped a Betty Boop soundalike. Browne claimed inspiration from Paris in the twenties, when he imagined a first taste of social liberation leading to all-female salons. "Girlfriends getting together," he suggested innocently, in a doomed attempt to diffuse the obvious sapphic subtext. Too late. When "I Hate Men," fromKiss Me, Kate, sailed into the ether, it set off a mini-tsunami of knowing smirks.Browne insisted his vision was shaped by old movies, twisted by surreality. So the ambisextrous martinet who acted as the hostess for his all-gal get-together was blessed/cursed with a linebacker silhouette. Exaggeration for effect was the keynote. It wasn't just the shoulders that were bigger. Lengths were longer, volumes more voluminous, showpieces showier, fringes fringier. Some of them were so patently ridonkulous, they brought to mind the climber's response when asked why he scaled Everest: "Because it was there." Why did Browne suspend a pair of boxer shorts at floor level from a short skirt, or bless another model with sleeves that fell to the ground, where they ended in red lobster-claw oven mitts, rendering the appendages entirely useless? Because he could.The designer claimed the guiding principle in his womenswear was a transmogrification of menswear dress codes. Whatever subversion that implies was more than aired in this tableau vivant. But, because the show's the thing with Browne, his efforts to entertain and amuse always take precedence over the more conventional goals of a fashion show. Which meant that in today's grand design, the mermaid marooned at center stage or the floor-length necklace of little rubber duckies sported by one model meant as much as the most elaborately fringed, layered ensemble.Still, here's the thing with Browne: Women whoreallydress, like Michelle Harper, fetching at today's show in a vintage Balenciaga hat, find plenty to ravish the eye. She was very taken with a yellow and black plaid top matched to a striped skirt in the same colors, both lavished with sequins. She also favored the pleated A-line smock over a matching skirt with scalloped hem. It had the plain purity of a priest's vestments.
And a navy jacket that cinched over a skirt flaring to mid-calf would look great swinging past the public library on Fifth Avenue, where Browne staged his spectacle—perhaps in one of those parallel universes we experienced on the sci-fi TV seriesFringe.
11 September 2011
It's theatrical legend that Edward Albee wrote his masterworkWho's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?about two male couples. Thom Browne made legend reality today by staging his guys-and-dolls fantasy with an all-male cast. On the one hand, über-pinstriped suits, über-shouldered coats, and menacing glares. On the other, flapper fringes, long strands of pearls, and coquettish stares from under thoroughly modern Millie's cloche hat. All those gangsters and molls, plus socks with zips. Zippered socks!There are two things that are essential for attendance at a Thom Browne show (well, three, if you count the invitation): patience and a sense of humor. The designer staged his Spring show in Maxim's, the legendary Art Nouveau eatery on rue Royale. With the mercury hitting the mid-90s in the street outside, the shadowy red plush of the restaurant's air-conditioning-free interior took on a semblance of hell. It was an appropriate setting for another of Browne's typically surreal assaults on menswear convention.He aims to entertain, so what's the point in a po-faced dissection of outfits whose primary purposes were amusement and visual provocation? There were pointers to new facets of the collection that will be seen and sold in stores—those shoulders, for instance, and a new feel for sportiness (look harder, it's there)—but they were literally buried under a weight of patterns and textures that came on as strong as Kabuki.And that's where the patience comes in. In a theatrical display such as the one today, Browne's clothes require a stately pace that suspends the usual fashion-show urgency. By the time he showed his Eartha Kitt outfit (it was her voice on the soundtrack as the model paraded in a black sequined caftan decorated with red opium poppies), the Champagne, the plush, and the heat had done for the crowd.
25 June 2011
Thom Browne was raised Catholic. He's also partial to the homogenization that uniforms impose on people. Combine those two under a womenswear umbrella and the nuns that ruled his new show made perfect sense. In the Edna Barnes Salomon Room of the New York Public Library, American fashion's master showman staged a performance of evening vespers to the tune of—what else?—"How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" One by one, wimpled models handed their habits to Brian and Travis Davenport, the devastatingly handsome male model twins who are just the sort of cloakroom attendants you'd hope to find in heaven. And what were these brides of Christ wearing under their ecclesiastical garb? A stitch-by-stitch transposition of Browne's menswear vocabulary: checks, extreme proportions, difficult layering, and an absolute upending of red-white-and-blue tradition.Glaring down from the walls of the hallowed hall where Browne showed were a few centuries of Astor men, and their late-Victorian/early-Edwardian grandee style was reflected in the strictly tailored gray flannel and camel, the caped and hobbled shapes. Which meant there was no sex in Browne's look. But therewassubversion. The baseball jacket that stretched into a dress with an extreme hourglass shape, for instance. Or the lush astrakhan jacket that expanded into a vinyl peplum. The overt theatricality of Browne's layering was also a challenge. Baby, it may be cold outside, but the capelet over cape over cable-knit skirt was a theatrical layer too far. Still, as with Browne's menswear, you suspect that elements of the whole—the patent clutches, for a start—will be extracted over time for commercial effect.Speaking of theater, Browne was fearless in his manipulation of outlandish silhouette: The egg and the cage were reminiscent of an earlier fashion provocateur, Jean Paul Gaultier. Equally, they could be Gaga today, and it is probably in that context that Browne's work should be judged. The sui generis lexicon he has established for himself is just as critic-proof as hers.
13 February 2011
Thom Brownesees American men as strangers in a strange land. Last season, he projected them into space. Today, he spirited them back to the eighteenth century, with a show that took founding father Thomas Jefferson's sojourn in Paris as its starting point. In the Salon Impériale of the Westin hotel, Browne staged a sit-down dinner for 42 painted, peruked fops (the wigs were actually an Aran knit snood), who picked at a dieter's plate of sweet corn and peas while huge turkeys steamed invitingly on the table in front of them. Every so often, the men would arise as one and promenade around the dinner table in a game of musical chairs in a motion slow enough to suggest they might be plagued by gout, a favorite affliction of the eighteenth century.Browne's seriousness of purpose is indisputable. He claimed the show took a solid six months of planning. At the same time, when challenged about how much of his presentation was designed to bring a smile to his audience's face, he conceded that the full 20 minutes' running time had a tongue-in-cheek element. Just as well. There was such a stately lunacy to the whole affair that, coupled with Browne's idiosyncratic take on aristocratic Americana, we could have been watching a production ofMarat/Sadestaged by Ralph Lauren.Browne loves this stuff, bending a world to his will, but he's smart enough to know the show is notentirelythe thing. He indicated a riding influence in the collection, which yielded jackets with cutaways that buttoned to sleeves. He talked about a new high-buttoned shape. And he was insistent that you could winnow out a flotilla of wearable options from his theatrical parade. True, there was a navy blazer layered over a longer one in gray cord. There were plaid Bermudas and a red, white, and blue suede motocross jacket, and a navy shearling trench with huge buckles. There were also huge leg-of-mutton sleeves, and britches trimmed with pheasant feathers, a St. Trinian's schoolgirl uniform in gray mohair, and a dramatic coat whose Empire line and sweeping train brought together the wardrobe of Thomas Jefferson and his wife Martha.In the world of fashion, The Option has become a treasured tool with which to seduce shoppers. The vast range of Thom Browne's offering carries the act of seduction to an entirely illogical extreme. For that alone, he should be declared a national treasure.
22 January 2011
The venue for Thom Browne's Paris debut was a modernist architectural landmark—the headquarters of France's Communist Party, designed by Oscar Niemeyer. The mind ran riot. How would the master showman of fashion surrealism rise to his surroundings? Surely there'd be at least one guy in a long train. Well, surprise, surprise. Browne left the architecture to speak for itself as he mounted his most commercial show to date.The opening—a march-past of "astronauts"—promised signature space oddities from Browne, but then the man-droids stripped off their jumpsuits to reveal two-button jackets, Bermuda shorts, and kneesocks underneath. In other words, a straightforward presentation of one of the designer's most sellable looks in an all-styles-served-here range of options, from his own classic gray flannel to a shimmering sequined plaid. The designer loves a uniform, and this is probably his most uniform look, so the event acted as a newcomer's introduction to his singular aesthetic. For those already partial to his work, it was a chance to see Browne's concentration on his craft: the fabric development, the appliqués, the embroidery, even his morbid wit (one motif featured a shark pursuing innocent little goldfish).
26 June 2010
Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.
14 February 2010
"Welcome to the craziest show on earth!" cried the master of ceremonies under Thom Browne's big top—so we can't say we weren't warned. But Browne's madness was an entirely studied proposition. He recently claimed that the humor in his shows was intended to balance out the seriousness of the clothes, and one supposes there's a yuk or two in an outfit that looked like a soufflé of crow's feathers, or another feathered affair that would've fit right in on the sidelines of a baseball game. Ultimately, though, it wasn't laughter one was left with, and not just because hollow-eyed models stared down the front row with threatening glares that said, "Go ahead, laugh and I'll…"Browne's twisted agenda became much clearer with this presentation. If there has always been something intangibly perverse in the way he stages his shows (not to mention the clothes themselves), the intangibility came into focus this time. The notion of empowerment is a staple in men's and womenswear; careers have been based on it. But how do you make sense of its opposite as the cornerstone of a collection?All the socioeconomic evidence you can muster suggests it's no longer a man's world. So Browne's clothes emphasized male helplessness. You could blame the staging for the model who hobbled arduously around the rink in a mummy wrap of plasticized argyle, or the stilt walker who tentatively emerged for the finale with two choirboy acolytes keeping him upright, but mannequin mobility was also hindered by back-buttoning capelets, side-buttoning waders, papal skirts, and a suspendered onesie that elongated babywear for the adult male. (No fetish there!) There was also a Siamese twin cameo that rammed the point home, but one of the "twins" was blushing so furiously it seems kindest to draw a veil over his embarrassment. Curiouser and curiouser, the "real" clothes were Browne's best, especially the officer's coats and those signature suits. But this show's primary message was that masculinity is more of a mystery than ever for Thom Browne.
3 February 2008
Thom Browne loves the old red, white, and blue… in his own deeply twisted way. The designer closed his show withThe Star-Spangled Banner, but it was Jimi Hendrix's cliché-bombing live version that he opted for. That seemed only appropriate, after a presentation that exploded the masculine certitudes of patrician Americana. Browne's shows have transcended mere menswear manifesto to become pieces of surreal performance art—at least, that's one way to interpret a finale composed of a "bride" demurely toting his train of tricolored rosettes down the catwalk with a retinue of lifeguard "bridesmaids" in attendance. Such flourishes—there was also a sixties surfer-dude thing going on, though more as styling cue than thematic undercurrent—ensured the presentation was reminiscent of some of Rei Kawakubo's more provocative propositions in the past. Just like Kawakubo, Browne has yet to encounter a rule he didn't fancy breaking. Hence, proportions so skewed they were positively bizarre. The key word was "short." Suit jackets had sleeves that ended mid-bicep, and shorts were essentially hot pants.It's Browne's peculiar achievement that such indulgences don't compromise the "maleness" of his men. Even when they were wrapped Lana Tuner–like in big fluffy towels, they were still butch—weird, but butch. That's why his sensibility has infiltrated the menswear mainstream. As far as Trojan horses go, it was easy to imagine this collection's overload on plaid tickling a few fancies. Like a plaid suit covered by a coat in a lacquered version of the same pattern, or a suit, shirt, and tie all matching. Men who have adjusted to the Browne crop will find it in a more generous, fuller-legged, wider-cuffed version for spring.But that's commerce. It's inevitably more intriguing to speculate on the implications of shirtsleeves extended and knotted straitjacket-style at the back, or suits bulked up to Sasquatch proportions with rosettes. Browne's men are undoubtedly men, but they're not moving as easily in the modern world.
5 September 2007
The first outfit was announced by the swell of the fourth movement of Mahler's Fifth Symphony, a piece of music that would tug at the heartstrings of anyone who was, say, swept away by Visconti'sDeath in Veniceat an impressionable age. And that's really the only kind of age that interests Thom Browne: the moment when one's sense of one's own difference from everyone else finally throws caution to the wind and shoots off on an intensely personal trajectory. "I had fun," the designer announced cheerily, after a show that confounded the essential constructs of modern menswear (let alone American sportswear).His work is so utterly sui generis that one is compelled to decompress from one's standard outlook and marvel at the force of will that proposes a passementerie shorts suit (and we do mean short) with button-down, thigh-high socks as a viable alternative to a man's quotidian garb. "Propose" really is the operative word, because the show was, as ever, a smorgasbord of suggestions on Browne's part, almost any one of which could be adapted for a customer not quite ready for a full-scale plunge into Thomworld.The collection's key jacket shape was derived from the Norfolk, originally a nineteenth-century hunting style, here shrunken and exaggerated till it had an almost Empire line. The same ambiguously transformative impulse married tunic and parka (tunka?) in a silvery, stiffened A-line poncho that the model doffed to reveal a fitted three-piece suit in the same fabric. Dangling suspenders only served to emphasize the droog-y subtext. It's this interplay of outré associations that gives Browne's work its power. Watching old movies on a trip to Japan got him thinking about male geishas (he originally wanted his models to be completely hobbled when they moved). And this is the designer who is now working in the belly of the Brooks Brothers beast. It's simply not possible for menswear to ever be the same again.
4 February 2007
A 30-minute film made in collaboration with artist Anthony Goicolea introduced Thom Browne's Spring 2007 collection. In its silent, sensual depiction of young men creating their own clothes for weddings and funerals, it nailed the fascinatingly fetishized nature of Browne's work. Call it a magnificent obsession, if you like, but there's no one else whose brooding over the mysteries of masculinity is producing clothes like this. It's a love-it-or-loathe-it proposition, and that is exactly the way Browne himself insists he wants it to be. There is unlikely to be a middle ground on an item like this collection's silk faille morning tails with their 70-inch train, or the jackets with bustles lined in ruffled Indian cotton, or the sheer trousers (Browne talked about "the humor of teaching guys to wear underwear," in the same way that he likes seeing a nice undershirt under a sheer shirt). But those were the season's most extreme proposals. More intrinsic to the Browne aesthetic were two other new ideas: the double-breasted jacket and a two-button style. These were even more fitted than Browne's jackets in the past, but by way of compensation, he'd added extra volume to the piece his customers might wear over them: a flyaway silk raglan coat, say, or one made from the same aluminum mesh you'd find in a screen door. Browne claimed he'd been thinking about the genteel traditions of the South when he called his collection "a new take on Americana." One result was the veiled effect achieved by layering gauzy dotted-Swiss voile over a cotton blazer. It was a detail you might find in women's couture, as were the ostrich feathers hand-embroidered onto another jacket. As mad as that might look for a man, it had a peculiar free-your-mind allure.
9 September 2006
Rosy-cheeked and eternally boyish in his shrunken suits, Thom Browne makes an unlikely fashion insurrectionist. But with the entire world gone jeans-'n'-T-shirt casual, he believes formality is the truly radical way to dress. So he imagined his precisely tailored clothes worn by radical guys—skiers, skaters, snowboarders. "It was important to get the clothes in motion," he said as he watched his boys spin through fake snow on a mini-rink to the unlikely strains of Rachmaninoff.It turned out to be the perfect way to highlight the extreme sports detailing (the inset quilting, the elbow and knee patches, the padded calves). Browne hasn't changed his extraordinary signature proportions—the cropped jacket, the shorts, and the little coat with the high half-belt that evoke old pictures of Prince Charles off to boarding school. But for fall he added much longer coats, because after all, legs can get cold in those cutoffs. He also covered bare flesh with long johns, though he was equally taken by socks and garters, which, as he so rightly observed, isn't a look you see on many young men these days.Browne's more conventional winter wear included his version of the Puffa vest, in corduroy or cashmere, and a fur jacket with a sportily striped revers. One of his mannequins imperiously sported a beaver stole over his gray cashmere-flannel shorts suit. "Like Russian nobility," Browne mused, though such aristocratic connotations were hardly the focus of this energetic show.
5 February 2006
In jacket and matching shorts, which exposed well-defined gams that kneesocks couldn't quite hide, Thom Browne was his own best advertisement at a Bergdorf Goodman showcase.As two of his favorite indie bands alternated playing short sets while sporting tailored outfits from his new collection, Browne declared that the T-shirt-and-jean uniform is now so ubiquitous that its anti-establishment credentials are shot. For young rockers, bespoke is the new rebel yell. That means gorgeous fabrics, French-cuffed shirts, mother-of-pearl buttons, and jackets with surgeon's sleeves (the buttonholes work!).But Browne's new clothes are about more than just tradition. He likes awkwardness (it undercuts the boringness of perfection), which is why his signature outfit is that shorts suit, proportioned like a boy's school uniform. There was awkwardness in his other proportions, too: the cropped jackets and trousers, the checked coat with high slash pockets (evoking the self-consciousness of a preteen Prince Charles), the button-down collar on a fitted shirt whose short sleeves also featured a tiny buttoned cuff.The general air of subtle subversion was also evident in the rough-and-smooth contrast of a crumpled evening shirt under a raw-silk jacket or the twisted mod sharpness of a three-piece suit in palest lemon brocade. Odd—but so confident and luxurious that it became an object of desire.
15 September 2005