NEW YORK IS a city lived out in the open, a place where, pandemic or not, you see people in captivating outfits every day. But two decades after the 56-year-old American fashion designer Thom Browne established his line, it’s still startling to see someone wearing one of his suits out in the wild. These devotees typically adhere to Browne’s proportional dictates for his signature shrunken 1950s-inspired tailoring: The trousers should be hemmed short, rising two or three inches above sockless black leather brogues; their cuffs should likewise approach three inches. The matching three-button jacket, cut high in the armholes — both broadening the shoulders and discouraging bad posture — should be fastened only once, snugly around the rib cage, from which the blazer should skim six inches over the pants’ waist. Its truncated sleeves should reveal an inch of white shirt cuffs underneath, and don’t forget the white pocket square, which “should be ironed, and stick out only one-third inch,” as one guide published by the brand explains.
Ideally, the suit is a seasonless medium gray. Browne creates entire rainbows out of slight gradations, from charcoal to cement to dull pewter, which together conjure the variegated spire of 1930’s Chrysler Building, glinting in monochrome. For the fabric, choose the nicest Italian wool possible: cashmere, perhaps, or Super 120s. According to Daniel Roseberry, the 36-year-old artistic director of Schiaparelli, who spent a decade working at Thom Browne, rising to become its men’s and women’s design director before departing in 2018, the jackets’ natural materials seem to “melt” into the body. For many years, Browne produced his suits and runway looks with Rocco Ciccarelli, a now-retired Italian tailor who was based in Long Island City, Queens, and “they’re the best-made clothes in the world,” says Roseberry. “Once you wear them, you realize you’ve never looked better. You sit up straight. You’re aware of everything you eat. They ask something of you, and they really set you apart from society.”
They also set Browne apart in his own industry. As fashion has become more commercial, it’s increasingly driven by hanger appeal — the handbag that glows on a shelf; the dress that looks good in an e-commerce still life — and yet, to understand how Browne’s pieces have become some of this millennium’s most recognizable grails, they need to be experienced not on racks, where they just look like suits, but on bodies in motion, where these seemingly anonymous garments announce distinct personalities: Maybe she’s a fierce lesbian who wants to show off her butch side, or he’s a fastidious queer who wants to feel a little foppish; maybe they’re straight finance people who dress to intimidate their colleagues, or to prove they’re not as square as their careers suggest; maybe they’re creatives who wear a daily uniform so they have more energy to just see. Maybe they’re actors, rappers or athletes who choose these suits because they’re both irrefutably masculine and yet too rebellious — too nerdy, too strange, too irregular — to imply that such categories still matter. Or maybe they’re nonbinary, swapping those trousers in favor of Browne’s pleated skirts, which invoke Britney Spears in her schoolgirl phase.
Browne’s followers are fervent in their devotion, and their loyalty hasn’t been overlooked. Four years ago, the Italian fashion conglomerate Ermenegildo Zegna Group acquired 85 percent of Thom Browne Inc., valuing the company at $500 million. (There have been various backers over the years, but Browne is now the only other shareholder.) The business has grown since: According to chief executive officer Rodrigo Bazan, there will be 100 stores worldwide by the end of next year; sales are split almost evenly among America, Europe and Asia, where China is the fastest-growing market. Although Browne made his name in men’s wear, women’s wear, which he launched in 2011, now comprises nearly half the company’s revenue.
To be one of Browne’s clients is to submit completely to his vision, much as fashion disciples of other eras have bowed to the Japanese designers Yohji Yamamoto or Rei Kawakubo, or to the American Rick Owens. For Browne’s acolytes have defined themselves not by their gender, age or country of origin but by a life — and a look — of discipline.
THE THOM BROWNE offices occupy three floors of a bland midrise building in Midtown Manhattan, accessed via an unlabeled silver metal door with slatted white blinds that opens onto a long hallway with the same gray terrazzo floors and gray marble walls as the brand’s boutiques. Here, where a fifth of the company’s 500 employees work, everyone is outfitted head to toe in Thom Browne, for which they’re provided a clothing allowance. They look great, though it’s jarring to see this many people dressed so well in a modern American workplace, one that has remained more or less open throughout the pandemic.
In these rooms, Browne commands a paternal respect, even if he’s chosen not to have children himself. His employees regard him as a father figure: “I like the idea that we’re familial, that they see me as more than a boss,” he says while seated at a 1950s white marble Eero Saarinen table. Next to him is Matthew Foley, 34, the company’s vice president of communications, who’s worked with Browne for 11 years and is now keeping watch in his own skinny gray suit. Like most staffers, Foley is usually dressed in Thom Browne, even when off duty. “Thom is so great at sharing his enthusiasm. Everyone’s pushing the same idea forward, and that builds a lot of camaraderie,” he explains; it reminds me of Andy Warhol, the charismatic artist as cult leader, not that anyone is being held or styled against their will. Most of them, Browne says, show up to their interviews looking the part — it’s difficult to think of another company, at least in America, as self-selective.
The designer himself is wearing a wool cardigan and a wool vest, in slightly different shades of flinty gray, the latter of which is buttoned over a white oxford shirt and gray tie, held in place with a squat silver tie bar. The shirt’s collar buttons are undone; the tip of the tie is tucked into gray suiting shorts, which Browne wears high and tight like a park ranger gone corporate, leaving his knees fully exposed. It’s December, so he’s paired his black pebbled leather wingtips with black socks that come halfway up his shins, one of them decorated with the four white stripes that have become one of the brand’s hallmarks. His silver hair is severely cropped, his posture pin-straight, his voice gravelly. It’s easy to buy what he’s selling — to imagine him as a midcentury advertising executive, someone out of Life magazine (or, sure, “Mad Men”), but he’s warmer, funnier and more spontaneous, cracking wry jokes that poke holes in his facade of self-seriousness. “We’re in fashion, and it should be entertaining,” he says. Weeks later, he tells me over cappuccinos at the Upper East Side Italian cafe Sant Ambroeus that he wishes fashion people would lighten up: “I do things that are ridiculous, and sometimes I don’t know why they’re not laughing.”
Browne didn’t set out to work in fashion. In his early 20s, he went to Los Angeles to try to make it as an actor — born Tom, he only added the “H” because his name was taken by someone else in the Screen Actors Guild — and started making clothes after befriending Johnson Hartig, who went on to found the outré California brand Libertine. Back in New York, Browne worked in the showroom at Armani and then served as the men’s creative director at Club Monaco (which was then owned by Ralph Lauren, a clear influence). When he opened his own West Village shop 20 years ago, he wore the same trousers and jackets he was selling made-to-measure. “I was the worst employee,” he says. “I used to lock the door and hide under the cash register.”
It was the early aughts, and men’s fashion was becoming more casual — this was a time of status skinny jeans, leather motorcycle jackets and several-hundred-dollar hoodies — and few people understood why Browne was pushing suits, much less why he was trying to reinvent their proportions. Back then, he recalls, even New York City schoolchildren used to taunt him on his way to the store, so unaccustomed were they to seeing “male cleavage,” which is what Browne calls bare ankles.
He was committed, he says, to staying “pure.” Once, when Jimmy Fallon came in to buy a suit, he asked Browne to lower the trouser hem and let out the jacket to create a more forgiving silhouette; the designer refused (the comedian eventually bought a suit anyway). A few months later, David Bowie visited the shop and, to Browne’s surprise, told him he wanted to wear the look as it was intended. Not long after, two of the era’s most influential fashion buyers — Sarah Andelman of Colette in Paris and Margaret Spaniolo of Bergdorf Goodman in New York, who later became president of Thom Browne Inc. — proposed selling the gray suits to both men and women, since the sizing already ran small; it was then, in 2006, that Browne knew he was on to something.
But why the suit? It was just what Browne wanted to wear, but he also knew he could build a brand by establishing that “one image in your head,” he says. Despite the garment’s ubiquity, very few designers can genuinely claim to have reinvented it: Browne is part of a small group that includes the French feminist Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, with her 1920s tweeds; the Italian playboy Giorgio Armani, with his 1980s slouchy sharkskin; and the Japanese experimentalist Kawakubo, of Comme des Garçons, who for decades has sold hers in piecemeal, oversize proportions. Which is not to say that Browne will mention any of these predecessors himself, nor allow his team to reference their looks on mood boards, a standard practice that he forbids. “I don’t want to hear that so-and-so is doing this, because I want to do it my way,” Browne says. “I like when fashion evolves, but I hate when fashion changes.”
MEN HAVE BEEN wearing suits in the West for more than 400 years, going back to the breeches and waistcoats that aristocrats preferred in the 17th-century French and English courts. These looks relaxed during the Victorian and Edwardian periods, and the simpler version we know today became popular after the Second World War, in part because of cloth rationing, when a rising American middle class demanded off-the-rack options. “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” as the writer Sloan Wilson titled his booze-soaked 1955 novel, became not just the era’s defining style icon but a glum commentary on American striving and the conformity it produced.
It’s how Browne’s businessman father, James, dressed for work. (He shopped at Brooks Brothers, with which Browne collaborated from 2007 to 2015.) The family lived in Allentown, Penn., a former iron town where Browne’s mother, Bernice, a lawyer, sent her seven children to Catholic schools that required uniforms of oxford shirts, navy blazers and leather shoes. As the middle child, Browne was, and still is, “very competitive” and excelled at tennis in high school before swimming at Notre Dame, where he studied economics and overlapped with several of his siblings, most of whom went on to become doctors and attorneys. (They’re still close; the sisters wear his clothes more than the brothers do.) Today, he mostly runs, eight miles in the morning, one of many routines — like eating toast for breakfast or having Krug Champagne in a crystal coupe every night — that Browne employs to give his days the same order his brand espouses. “I like the rigor of a schedule,” he says. “The game of a more regimented life.”
It’s easy to see how Browne’s upbringing influenced his fetish for boundary-setting. More striking, though, is how he’s taken the look of his father’s generation — and the tropes of straight suburban life — and subverted it, questioning the role and purpose of the suit, wresting it away from its white-collar tedium and transforming it into something that’s undeniably fashion. By constantly tweaking his trademark gray tailoring, remaking (and unmaking) it in countless permutations over 76 collections, he’s forever referencing the heteronormative hegemony of the American patriarchy, but he’s also always taking revenge on it, encouraging all sorts of artists, tomboys, trans people, foreigners and other outsiders to wear pieces that weren’t originally meant for them, all produced in a country that wasn’t meant for them, either.
Although Browne is one of America’s most successful designers, he’s also a deserter — an avant-gardist from a ready-to-wear nation who, since 2010, has primarily shown his men’s collections in Paris, a city that, he says, better accepted his conceptual approach and opened his business up to a more international audience (he also started showing women’s wear there five years ago). As with any absconder, this vantage point appears to have helped him reconsider America itself, not that he’s renounced it: “I’m challenging myself to make it important that I’m worthy of being in Paris,” he says. “Hopefully, America is proud that I’m representing it well.” Before he begins each collection, he invents a romantic story and mise-en-scène in his head — a menagerie of giraffes, unicorns and other creatures who come alive on the runway; cute boys ice-skating together on a snowy evening — and later chooses and elaborately decorates a venue as if it’s a movie set; there’s always a sense of theatricality that reflects Browne’s admiration for acting and old Hollywood. You can tell everyone knows they’re performing: As the director, Browne styles every collection himself and casts models, he says, “who can do something other than just walk in the clothes, because it’s more than that.”
Unlike other designers, who are often chasing new silhouettes or trends, Browne’s iterative practice involves revisiting similar motifs from year to year (punk-prep plaids and hand-pieced intarsia in fall; floral embroidery and seersucker suits in spring), each time overlaid with a distinctive theme, whether it’s nautical or carnival, clowns or dandies, med school students or Japanese schoolgirls, Victorian brides in coffins or John F. Kennedy. But the fabrics, fabrications, shapes and palette — often limited to Easter Sunday pastels, in addition to the continental red, white and blue of his customary grosgrain trim — haven’t changed much, even as the context does. In that way, one can see Browne’s influence on designers such as Balenciaga’s Demna, Gucci’s Alessandro Michele and others whose aesthetics remain constant even as the content of their shows — or films or performances — varies widely.
Because many of Browne’s men’s pieces are cut short and close to the body, and many of the women’s ones are constrictive, a misconception has grown that Thom Browne is only for skinny young people. Yet he’s long given a wide range of famous people (not to mention his staff, diverse in body type, race, age and gender) memorable outfits to wear. The celebrities he dresses today fall into two different camps: The first includes established talents like the artists Amy Sherald and Anh Duong and the actors David Harbour, Whoopi Goldberg and Diane Keaton, all people whom Browne respects, he says, for having “put in a body of work.” The second group includes, essentially, the swaggiest young people of the moment, such as the rappers Lil Uzi Vert and Lil Nas X, the actors Kristen Stewart and Timothée Chalamet and polymathic talents like Cardi B and Jeremy O. Harris. “Thom would always talk about charm,” says Roseberry. “He’s got such an instinct about the people that he surrounds himself with, and so much of it is about personality.”
In the center of this sphere of influence, there’s LeBron James, the 37-year-old, 6-foot-9 N.B.A. power forward, who, since he began wearing the label in 2012, has become a one-man billboard for Browne’s universe. Four years ago, James and the rest of the Cleveland Cavaliers arrived at their playoff games in coordinated gray suits, escalating the arms race that is courtside fashion. It was one of Browne’s proudest moments, largely because it once again challenged the notion of who these clothes are for: the geek who was bullied but also the jock, that epitome of traditional American maleness. “Here’s a really cultural moment, where these young kids that follow these superstar athletes — who can buy anything in the world, who can wear anything in the world, who can dress themselves very individualistically — see them representing themselves as a team,” he says.
Another crucial way he’s expanded his roster is by interrogating the distinction between men’s wear and women’s wear. For his spring 2022 season, in a departure of sorts, he showed both collections together in New York, creating a fantastical park inspired by the 1962 J.G. Ballard short story “The Garden of Time,” populated by gender-nonbinary Greek statues come to life, many wearing tulle sheath dresses in gray, indigo, cherry red and fuchsia with trompe l’oeil six-packs, breasts and toga folds.
Since the early days, Browne has regularly put male models in dresses and skirts. He readily admits he wasn’t the first designer to do so, but he nonetheless deserves some recognition for anticipating shifting realities around genderless dressing years before it became trendy at other fashion houses (and in the culture at large). “The idea of women’s wear and men’s wear becoming one, it’s just an interesting way of thinking about things,” he says. “People are so brave with how they live their lives that it needs to be celebrated.” His clothing has of late become desirable among folks who are shifting expectations around gender expression: for instance, the trans actress Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, who wore a Thom Browne tuxedo-as-gown to last year’s Met Gala, and the theater impresario Jordan Roth, who began collecting Browne’s pieces after he grew out his hair and started wearing fitted dresses and heels to Broadway events. “There’s a duality, from masculinity and femininity in extreme to the anonymousness of the uniform, along with the uniqueness of extravagant design,” says Roth, who is 46. “And while you might think he must be very serious, to only see the seriousness is to miss the wit.”
In other words, the work is unabashedly queer. So is Browne: His partner is Andrew Bolton, the 55-year-old head curator of the Met’s Costume Institute, with whom he recently purchased and renovated a 15-room Sutton Place mansion formerly owned by the philanthropist Drue Heinz, stripping out its 1970s-era Renzo Mongiardino-designed interior in favor of something more restrained (but less so than his last apartment, where he slept on a flannel-blanketed twin bed). And yet — even though so much of his work is autobiographical — Browne doesn’t seem to view his sexuality as all that relevant. “I just want it to be what it is,” he says, after mentioning that he’s never worn one of his own skirts. “I know we live in a world that has to label everything and talk about everything, but I just want to do it, and I want to live it.”
Most of all, he wants to “make sure that everybody feels included and part of the conversation.” Still, over the years, he’s occasionally been accused by critics of making his models — particularly the women — suffer, binding their arms to their sides or having them totter down runways in inhumane shoes. Other times, the attendees may have felt they were the ones being tortured: Presentations typically proceed very slowly and often start late; one season, guests were driven mad during a mental asylum-themed show by a looping soundtrack of Björk repeatedly telling them to “shhhh,” from her 1995 song “It’s Oh So Quiet,” for nearly an hour, after unexpected delays. Browne was disappointed that a few invitees left before the show began, though he remains steadfast in his intentions: “We’re in a world where everything is so immediate and fast-paced, and I like the idea of making it uncomfortable — I don’t want to do something that’s so easy for people,” he says.
This extends to the actual garments, items like argyle straitjackets that many would consider too wacky to wear. In 2009, during the global financial crisis, the company nearly went bankrupt. Browne found a new backer and has since introduced evergreen items like white sneakers, swimsuits, leather accessories and animal-shaped handbags, gym shorts and sweatpants. Now, he says, “I don’t care if any of the show pieces sell. They’re purely for provocation, for humor — and they make that gray suit interesting again because you see that glimmer of it in something that was weirdly conceptual.”
MY FAVORITE THOM Browne collection isn’t really a Thom Browne collection, but it’s definitely weirdly conceptual, which might explain why he loves it, too. In 2009, the designer was invited to present at the Pitti Uomo trade fair in Florence, Italy, a men’s wear main stage that’s considered a place to show off.
Within a wood-tiled auditorium at an aeronautical college, he set up 40 identical metal desks in four vertical rows, all organized neatly with vintage typewriters and stacks of white paper. As the lights brightened, a tall man with slicked-back hair walked in and took off his tan trench coat and gray suit jacket, then sat at a lone desk facing the rest, distinguished only by its tabletop bell. When he rang it, 40 men wearing the exact same outfit marched in and removed their outerwear, revealing gray trousers and jackets beneath. They all retrieved red apples from their black leather briefcases and placed them on their desks, where they began intently typing. It was completely silent but for the clattering of the keys, which sounded like rain on a tin roof. Then, after 10 minutes, it was time to go, so they all lined up again and filed out, but not before leaving each of their apples on the manager’s desk. Like many of Browne’s best concepts, it was straightforward but strange — an otherworldly vision of an office where there was no drama, no laziness and no casual Friday, just civility and meticulousness and devotion.
Browne has repeatedly referenced this performance. Last year, to introduce a collection of children’s wear, he made a video with the artist Cass Bird that features tiny tycoons toiling in suits on similar typewriters, though they receive milk cartons with their apples. Like a recurring metaphor in a good book, you get the sense that this utopian office is a place Browne will continue to revisit, as he tries to make his own Hollywood film, say, or find ways to sell clothing that’s less expensive. There’s still so much left to accomplish. “Years from now, I want it to look like one story that started from that gray suit,” he says. “Maybe for the last show, I’ll go back to Florence and do it in reverse.”
“Actually,” he says, a mischievous grin forming across his face, “that’s a great idea.”
In that imagined future, maybe the employees won’t all be men. Maybe they’ll be in skirts, or whatever else interesting people are wearing decades from now. The lights will dim and, rather than come to work, the boss will put on his gray jacket one last time and say goodbye. Maybe he’ll leave the firm in someone’s capable hands — or, if that person doesn’t exist, shut down the shop forever.
Models: Ernesto Peña-Shaw at Next Management, Daniel Avshalumov at Wilhelmina Models, Ambar Cristal at Next Management and Jordy Emmanuel at Crawford Models. Hair by Dylan Chavles using Oribe Hair Care at MA + Group. Makeup by Ingeborg using Dior Forever foundation. Casting by Gabrielle Lawrence. Production: Lolly Would. Photo assistants: Xavier Muñiz, Pierre Bonnet. Tailor: Carol Ai. Stylist’s assistants: Gabe Gutierrez, Sofia Amaral
