“People say, ‘Oh, you’re a designer.’ And, yes, I design. But I’m an artist first.” Hearing this statement at a first-time Fashion Week showroom appointment would usually have me mentally rolling my eyes, framing my excuses, and edging toward the door. Coming from Josué Thomas on the last afternoon of his debut stand-alone Paris presentation, however, it computed.
The reason for this was neither the easel we were standing next to nor the paint-spattered suiting tailored from Thomas’s twill drop cloths on the racks in the hall of this fancy apartment behind Avenue Montaigne. It was more that Thomas’s approach to streetwear, when the very term streetwear in fashion has become freighted with semiotic shade, is so elevating: He sees it as art. Because who’s to say it can’t be?
Gallery Dept. was founded by Los Angeles–born Thomas, now 40, back in 2016. He started out by reworking vintage pieces on a made-to-order basis, deconstructing then reconstructing, and typically marking the garments with paint. For a while, around 2018 or so, his “L.A. flare”–reworked Levi’s and Carhartts became a silhouette-shifting sensation. In 2020, Virgil Abloh told The New York Times: “I see Josué as making a new canon of his own, showcasing what Black design can do.” As for those flares, Abloh called them “the most important new cut of denim in the last decade since the skinny jean.” More recently, there have been merch collaborations with Migos, Lanvin, and the ubiquitous Ugg.
Thomas has been to Paris to pitch to buyers in multi-brand showrooms before, but this season’s re-creation of his home studio (Thomas is now based in Miami but worked out of Paris all last summer) comes at a moment of planned expansion. He has taken an apartment in the French capital and hopes to establish an outpost in Milan imminently too. He added, “There is going to be more editorial and look books, more storytelling and expression. And now we are working on having a runway show next year.”
Attempts to intersect art and fashion are often sunk on the perilous triple-pronged reef of discipline snobbery, commercial cringe, and vanity shaming. Thomas seems nicely placed to challenge these prejudices: “The work we’ve been putting in, and what it is and what it’s evolved into—it needs the light of day a bit. It’s been a natural, truthful, honest evolution.”
