Thom Browne has said that if one of his catwalk shows receives only positive reviews, he worries he has played it too safe. He much prefers to ruffle a few feathers.
Literally so, this season. Birds, which along with shrunken grey suits are a Thom Browne signature, were everywhere. The models’ eyelashes, made from bright feathers, had a wingspan that dusted the collar. Above the catwalk, 2,000 origami birds were suspended in flight.
But Browne may be disappointed this season, because these clothes were easy to love. Jackets and coats in British-made tweeds, their proportions tweaked rather than distorted, were charmingly embroidered with herons and magpies drawn from the luscious watercolours of John J Audubon’s Birds of America anthology. “I mix the conceptual with the classic, and it seems to work,” as he put it with a shrug after this show.
Browne wants to make clothes that are used, worn and worn again and again, embedded into real lives. Hence why he loves a suit, that 9-to-5, bread-and-butter uniform. But the skewed proportions of Browne’s suiting, with their tight sleeves and short legs, are a wink to camera by which the wearer tells the world that they are game for taking risks. David Bowie was a devoted customer. Where other designers put Sabrina Carpenter on their catwalk soundtrack, Browne prefers the poetry of Emily Dickinson.
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Only a few designers affect the shape of clothes on the street, but Browne is one. Every man who wears his trousers slightly cropped, so that a flash of sock is visible above his shoes, owes his look to Browne, who has based his career on the deliberately awkward proportions of the grey suits he has been selling since 2001. (Browne calls the ankle “male cleavage”.) Just as Giorgio Armani turned tailoring into loungewear in the 1980s with supple, gracefully oversized suits, so has Browne altered the silhouette of the man on the street.
Browne, like fellow New York grandee Marc Jacobs, sees fashion as a mind-altering substance and delights in ripping up the commercially minded rulebook of American fashion. Silhouette is paramount, which is why Browne uses grey, to sharpen the focus on shape. There was a new sporty boxiness this season – “a nod to the Super Bowl”, he said – in quarterback-wide blazers. But plenty of colours, too, this season: a pale pink cocoon gown had pistachio silk peeking from inverted pleats.
Browne has become a pillar of the American fashion industry. In 2018, he sold an 85% stake in his company to the Zegna group in a deal that valued his brand at $500,000 (£403,327). He has branched out into womenswear, dressing Michelle Obama, Serena Williams, Martha Stewart and the actor Ayo Edebiri. The rapper Doechii recently took home a Grammy for best rap album in bespoke Thom Browne tailoring. “Our classic grey suit has been around for 25 years, and while it never gets old for us, to see Doechii embrace it and contextualise it for a new generation was incredible,” said Browne at this show.
The designer is at the heart of the American fashion institute: his longterm partner is Andrew Bolton, the curator of the costume institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Anna Wintour is a friend and staunch supporter.
He has been invited by French fashion’s governing body to present an haute couture show in Paris, a rare honour, and is the chair of the Council of Fashion Designers America, a role previously held by Tom Ford and Diane von Fürstenberg, given the task of overseeing New York fashion week and guiding the careers of young designers. His advice to them is to take no notice of trends. “There are really talented kids in New York,” he said after this show. “And everyone’s got to do whatever they have got to do to survive.”
