“The new masculine drag, a beefy model in Thom Browne,” reads the caption of a look from Thom Browne’s spring 2007 collection in issue #23 of Butt magazine, which featured an interview with the designer.
Browne’s work has been described as theatrical and conceptual. It has been over-analyzed and over-simplified, both critically acclaimed and criticized for being too niche. This year, the designer is celebrating 20 years in business, which he’s marking with a monograph authored by his partner, the chief curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, Andrew Bolton.
“I hope people never saw it as drag,” Browne said in an interview, “drag is great, but that’s not what I do. I make clothing for provocation, but in a different way.” Browne likes to say that his work is over-intellectualized. He once told me that people ask him what his subversion of the suit means, and whether he’s making a point about the insidiousness of the patriarchy or the queering of masculinity. He insists it’s not that serious. But does that risk trivializing it?
“Yeah. And I don’t mind, in a way. There is intellectual thought that goes into that, but I don’t like my shows or collections to feel overwrought because it becomes pretentious.” Or, God forbid, “boring.”
There are two key elements to understanding Thom Browne, the brand. The first is that his label is deeply autobiographical: “It’s such a part of me that it has to be, but then I stretch it into different ideas to take the most interesting parts of my life, the mundane I keep to myself.” The second is that Browne has a perverse interest in provocation by way of the mundane: “I fundamentally come from mostly classic ideas, but I have zero interest in showing a classic idea in a way that’s safe.” Despite the severity of his famous uniforms, Browne has a rebellious side that is just as salient as his self-discipline. Perhaps this is the first hint at understanding Thom Browne, the man.
Here, the man ruminates on the last 20 years of the brand by touching on its most iconic moments, plus a deep cut or two.
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2003
Thom Browne: I was seeing private customers out of my apartment, and I got to the point where it became awkward. I figured that if I was going to do this I needed to make the next step. The meatpacking area was becoming a destination, but it wasn’t fully what it is now. The rent was cheap, it was a small space, and it was nice. It also got me out of the apartment. It was nice to be able to go to work.
TB: I initially had no employees, but when the first started there was no question, he had to wear the clothes. He had to understand the importance of wearing the clothes. One day he came to work with pink socks, and I had the awkward moment of having to remind him that pink socks were not going to work. It’s not that I wanted to take away a bit of his own personality, I wanted his personality to come through the focused idea that I needed people to see. That didn’t include a pair of pink socks.
2005
TB: I got a call and found out David Bowie wanted to come by. He was the most gracious, nicest, and I was so nervous. It was David Bowie. He said Thom, how should I wear it? And I was just like…uh I don’t know, but I wear it like this. He just said okay, then I’ll wear it like that. I also had Richard Avedon in the space down there, I had quite a few early on. Richard Avedon loved my jackets but he hated my trousers [laughs], but he was so nice too.
TB: At that point I had no money, but I wanted to do something. Bergdorf was the first customer in the US, and the first in the world after Colette in Paris. Nobody was wearing tailoring at that point, so the idea of seeing tailoring in this way, on a young band, I thought was a good introduction to people.
2006
TB: Just becoming a member of the CFDA was such an honor, and going to the awards was a big deal. That year I was nominated against Ralph [Lauren]. Growing up wearing Ralph Lauren and all of a sudden being mentioned in the same sentence with him and then winning. There’s no words to really describe it other than it was a validating moment that made me feel I was doing something right.
TB: Mark Forster was a good friend of mine from LA and he had called me up, and I love Ewan McGregor, so it was a nice project. It was very easy. Mark just let me make my clothes. Ewan looked good. He looked really good. I was getting to experience all these things that I never thought I was going to at the beginning. It was becoming a business and people were wearing it. But I was wanting to keep the momentum going. Even now I always just like things moving forward.
TB: The ribbon came from me growing up swimming and winning medals. Medals came on ribbons, mostly a red, white, and blue ribbon similar to the five-color one I use. I wanted to have some type of outward mark, and I had the four bars mostly on knitwear, but I wanted something I could put on everything on the back of the neck like a locker loop.
2007
TB: I have no recollection of why I put skirts in the collection other than why not? It was really that the coat and the length of the skirt worked really well, and it just didn’t look like normal tailoring. I hope people see that I’m just taking the idea of classic tailoring and playing with it in regards to proportion, detailing, or making it look interesting or different, either on a man or on a woman.
2009
TB: I wanted to really introduce that fundamental, focused idea of how I was approaching tailoring. I wanted to perform that mundane idea of guys going to work and multiply it in a way that I thought made it look interesting and not mundane. About Paris, I thought being an American designer and showing in the iconic fashion capital of the world was a good challenge. There were business reasons, too, because, especially for menswear, it was showing earlier than showing in New York, so we could start production earlier. I love showing here in New York too, so the mix is good.
2013
For Mrs. Obama, I just wanted her to feel great. I wanted her to look great. She’s a beautiful woman that is actually very easy to dress because she looks good in so much. For me, I wanted it to be true to what I wanted women to see, which was, of course, tailoring. I grew up with strong women, my mother and my sister, and I wanted her to just look as strong as she is.
Browne’s own personal uniform consists of a shirt, tie, cardigan, jacket, and shorts. He stopped wearing trousers in 2013.
TB: I officially started only wearing shorts I think 10 years ago. I just wanted to, but I think it was also the last time I got turned away from a restaurant either in Europe or in Asia, and I thought it was ridiculous. At that moment I decided that, first, I’m not going upstairs to put on trousers just to go into the restaurant, and second, I’m going to make this my mission, one of my things.
2014
TB: I had known of Stephen for a long time, and it was a good project, as part of the show was about animals and hunters. Then the set was, I think, a really important installation. It was probably the first true installation that could stand on its own outside of the show. It was an outdoor scene that was covered in all the fabrics of the collection. It has lived on past the show as art. It was shown in Art Basel in Switzerland.
2016
TB: When Hector came into our lives he changed them forever. It will be nine years since we’ve had him in May. It was just a silly idea to have a bag that looked like Hector, and 10 years later it’s still one of our top-selling bags.
2017
TB: For me it was simply the idea that if a guy wants to wear whatever he wants to wear, why can’t he wear it? It was about taking traditional women’s pieces and putting them on men. I thought it looked so good. The idea was simply: Why not? We also talked about the brand being autobiographical. My mother used to bronze the first pair of our shoes, so in the center of the show was a bronze pair of the shoes the models were wearing.
2018
TB: LeBron had been a customer for a long time, and I was at an awards show with Dwayne Wade and we had an initial conversation in regards to whether they’d wear the classic gray suit as a team to one of their games. He discussed it with LeBron and the two of them thought it was an amazing idea. I wanted it to be more of a real cultural moment because young kids look up to those guys so much. I wanted the idea of them wearing the suits as a team as opposed to them all wearing different things. I thought it was a good way to show kids that you can be a true individual without having to be so overtly individualistic within a team. They looked so good that then it naturally became a fashion moment as well.
2019
TB: It was one of those moments that you recognized how hard that level of celebrity is and how hard they work. You see all the glamour and the fun and the outward versions of being a celebrity, but you never see all the hard work that goes behind it. She only had an hour at three o’clock in the morning for a fitting, but she was there at three o’clock in the morning. It was a mutual relationship in that she appreciated what we were doing, and we appreciated her because she knew exactly who she was, what she wanted, how she wanted to feel in it, how she wanted to look in it, how she wanted to move in it.
2020
TB: That show is just the way I design now. I really don’t design for men and women anymore. I design, I think, interesting, beautiful clothes that you can put on a man or a woman. It just really works. That show was Noah’s Ark—two animals, two by two.
2021
The making of the Thom Browne spring 2021 show.
TB: We loved doing those films. It was a moment where you didn’t have much choice, so you had to figure out something. It was the first film and a time in production where we had to test every couple of hours. We had an Olympic athlete that almost tested out of being able to shoot. I can’t believe we lived through all that. I loved the idea of the Olympics in that stadium and then making it on the moon and having Hector as a blimp.
2022
TB: The first jockstrap was actually for spring 2010. But for that show [spring 2023], I wanted it to feel like a men’s couture show, and I wanted to use couture-level tweed fabrics and exaggerate the tailoring. I love hanging the tailored bottoms from either corsets or underwear or boxers, and I thought why not try it from a jockstrap. I wanted it to be obnoxiously low-hanging. I thought seeing that part of the body, the front, was a lot more interesting than seeing the butt crack [laughs]. I mean, is the butt crack really interesting? I thought the front part looked a lot more interesting.
2023
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TB: Why did it take 20 years? Because it takes some time to put enough together to warrant a book [laugh]. I don’t always look back, I like moving forward, but it was the anniversary and I had the luxury of doing it with Andrew. He is the reason why the book exists. It was approached almost as a museum book, because he does one every year. Andrew said that there is a consistency in the work, and I think that was the most important thing that I took away from his curation. I want people to see that I have evolved a lot over the last 20 years, but I haven’t changed, and think that’s what he was saying.
The Thom Browne book is available to order now at thombrowne.com and phaidon.com/thombrowne.
