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 in Alice 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.
