Walking through the leafy Parco Sempione in Milan on Tuesday night, one of the busiest evenings of the city’s annual Design Week, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were a million miles away from the various events and activations springing up all over town, attracting tens of thousands of design lovers every year. Until, that is, you spotted a phalanx of gray-suited attendants gathered outside the neoclassical facade of the Palazzina Appiani, a Napoleonic-era building overlooking the Arena Civica sporting ground. (Under the rustle of the leaves, you could just hear the commotion of runners doing their circuits beyond.)
What those gray suits signaled, of course, was that Thom Browne had arrived in town. After being ushered up to the first floor of the building, one encountered, under enormous chandeliers and a frescoed ceiling, six midcentury cots lined up to run through the center of the space, along with silver coat racks hung with the designer’s signature three-piece suits. But the assembled group of editors wasn’t there to admire Browne’s clothes (even if, in the performance that followed, that was still somewhat inevitable). Instead, they were checking out his latest foray into the world of homewares: this time, in collaboration with the storied Italian bedding company Frette, marking his first collection of bed linens.
“It’s not like we have to be doing these projects as collaborations,” says Browne of his rapidly growing homewares mini-empire, which already includes partnerships with Baccarat, Christofle, and Haviland. “But it’s a great learning process.” Indeed, for Browne—a long-time customer of Frette—part of the fun was simply discovering the remarkable savoir-faire involved in creating the 160-year-old house’s fabrics, which represent the very finest in Italian craftsmanship.
“I knew exactly how I wanted it to look—I wanted it to feel very classic,” he says of the designs, which include white sateen sheet sets, grey wool-cashmere blankets, and plush terry cotton towels. (Naturally, all come with a Thom Browne twist: the sheets are decorated with four lines of gray embroidery—a nod to his signature stripe motif—while his tricolor grosgrain tabs could be spotted on the cuffs and back collars of bathrobes.)
The items themselves may have been classic, but the mode they were presented in was anything but. As the lights in the room dimmed, and a twinkling Chopin nocturne piped softly from the speakers, a model in one of Browne’s short suits began slowly walking laps around the room, occasionally pausing to check his watch. Next came a procession of models in underwear tanks and shorts to strains of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty waltz, gathering behind the cots as two suited attendants looked on. After dressing in three-piece suits, they tucked themselves into bed and slipped on their Browne-branded sleep masks. “Those were a last-minute addition,” Browne notes of the latter items, which have all the potential to become a traveler status symbol.
It’s certainly not your typical way of showing a new collection of bed linens, but it’s very on-brand for Browne, whose runway spectacles have long included touches of the theatrical. “It was partly a reference to my first show in Europe 15 years ago,” Browne notes, referring to his debut as a guest designer for Pitti Uomo in 2009, for which he somewhat radically staged a performance art extravaganza in lieu of a standard-format runway show, with 40 models tapping away on typewriters at 40 desks—a full-throated expression of Browne’s unique brand of office drone chic.
“It’s about focusing on a single idea, and letting people sit with that,” Browne tells me during the two-hour-long presentation, as a bell sounded and the models awoke from their apparent slumber. (Ever the perfectionist, Browne quickly dashed off mid-interview to make sure the crowd wasn’t getting too close to the perimeter of the beds—the meticulous staging of the event was very clearly overseen by Browne himself.) But as the event’s attendees moved to sip Champagne on a sweeping outdoor terrace with tiered stone seating—a neatly geometric backdrop for the models to pose on afterward in their Thom Browne finery—and the sun dipped below the upper tiers of the arena beyond, it was a testament, perhaps, to the force of Browne’s vision that all I could think was: I’m ready for bed.
