Document Journal

Thom Browne is a man of beguiling contradiction. The New York designer exclusively wears his own signature shrunken gray suits. So do all of his employees. Walking into his Tribeca store, which is also mostly gray, is like being transported into some alternate reality where everyone is startlingly homogeneous (sartorially speaking), inconceivably natty, and almost certainly judging you for not being the same. It’s not corporate or stodgy—it’s uncanny. “And that’s exactly what I wanted it to be,” says Browne.

One might assume that Browne—a man who lives in silvertone, extols the delights of rigid uniformity, and even sketches with a Brutalist sensibility—designs some pretty stiff stuff. One might also assume that he presents said stiff stuff on militaristic models who march down a gray runway. Not so. Browne, who is the chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, possesses a prodigious appetite for beauty, fantasy, and storytelling. His Fall 2024 collection, photographed here by Jonas Huckstorf, was a particularly lavish feast. “The Raven,” Edgar Allan Poe’s exquisitely eldritch 1845 poem about a love lost, served as Browne’s inspiration. “It’s such a great story,” Browne reflects. And after Fall 2023’s colorfully upbeat (albeit still characteristically eerie) runway-retelling of the intergalactic adventures in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 children’s book Le Petit Prince, Browne wanted this fall’s ready-to-wear medley to be dark and provocative. “I started from there and worked the collection into a black-and-white world that’s somewhat moody,” he explains.

“Somewhat moody” is somewhat of an understatement. As Browne’s low-lit New York show space began to fill last February—on Valentine’s Day, no less—the usual front-row chit-chat waned once editors and admirers realized the monolithic figure in the center of the space was in fact a living, breathing model looming above us in a black puffer coat. In place of his arms were mangled twigs. Soon enough, models in topsy-turvy black-and-white looks—their braids defying gravity to protrude this way and that—emerged, walking around this foreboding creature, which Browne says was influenced by Julie Taymor’s surreal 1999 film Titus. As his models—each dressed in outfits imagined for the poem’s absent protagonist, the love interest Lenore—slowly strode around the space, actress Carrie Coon (whom you might know from HBO’s The Gilded Age) performed a dramatic reading of Poe’s poem, an element that further transformed Browne’s “runway show” into a piece of pure theater.

At the end of that show—and at the end of his recent Paris haute couture show, and on the video call during which our interview was conducted—Browne emerged in the same, aforementioned signature shrunken gray suit to take his bow. “The gray suit is a uniform that is so much a part of me that it’s almost like a piece of living art,” says Browne, who insists he never exists outside of the immaculate gray world he’s created for himself. “I think it was always in me,” he adds. “And I’ll never leave it until I die or retire.”

Here, the designer offers a glimpse into his oh-so-particular universe by defining some common fashion terms with a Browne-ian twist.

EVOLUTION [.e-vǝ-’lü-shǝn], noun: “Evolution is exactly how I want people to see my last 20 years: I started with one idea. It’s evolved. It hasn’t changed. It hasn’t deviated from the course.”
FASHION [‘fa-shǝn], noun: “I sometimes don’t feel like I do fashion. I don’t even feel like I’m in the world of fashion. I feel like I am in the world of making clothing really beautifully and showing it to people through stories. In fashion, every season there’s change. I approach my collections in the exact opposite way.”

GRAY [‘grā], noun: “There are so many shades of gray that can be played with. It’s timeless. But for me, its most interesting quality is that it feels very ‘non-fashion.’ In the beginning, I wanted to do something that everybody thought they understood and make them feel like, ‘I don’t know why I don’t understand this.’ And that’s exactly what I did with our gray suits.”

HAUTE COUTURE [.ot-ku-’tūr], noun: “Couture is challenging yourself to produce an entire collection and make clothing in the highest possible way in terms of construction, embroidery, and fabrication. When I was first officially on the couture calendar in 2023, I wanted to make sure that I created a collection that was worthy of being shown that week. But I do have to say, my other collections that I’ve shown in Paris and New York are on the same level. The storytelling, the fabrication—there’s not much difference in regards to the approach.”

HISTORY [‘hi-st(ǝ-)rē], noun: “The most important thing, especially in regards to creating collections, is that people don’t see the exact, specific story from the past—that there is a new interpretation of the reference from history.”

INSPIRATION [.in(t)-spǝ-’rā-shǝn], noun: “Inspiration is individual. It can emerge from—or be—anywhere and anything. The most important thing is to never be limited on where you can get inspiration. And, at least for me, you never know when it’s going to come.”

LEGACY [‘le-gǝ-sē], noun: “A legacy can be described and defined and holds meaning for others. When I started my collection, I wanted to create something that had a point of view and that meant something to people. If what you’ve done is the reason why people recognize you or want to listen to your stories or see what you do, then I think you probably have some type of legacy going on.”

LUXURY [‘lǝk-sh(ǝ-)-rē], noun: “Luxury is simply the idea of being able to do what you want to do, exactly how you want to do it.Of course, it can be equated to something that is made really well. But true luxury is just living your life in specifically the way you want to live it.”

MUSE [‘myüz], noun: “My collection started from this old man I’d see on Lexington Avenue starting in 1999 who always had on the same beautifully classic gray suit. He always looked so comfortable and confident in it.”

MUSLIN [‘mǝz-lǝn], noun: “A muslin is the fabrication or the idea of where the garment starts. The whole concept of my Fall 2024 couture collection was to play with muslin and use it as the finished garment to show the beauty in the art of creating clothes in the most pure way.”

NECKTIE [‘nek-.tī], noun: “Ties look good on everyone and are a must to complete any look. They should always be worn.”

PERFORMANCE [pǝr-’fȯr-mǝn(t)s], noun: “I show my collections through performance because it heightens the story and simply makes them more entertaining and interesting to watch. Maybe I’ve gotten more performative because I’ve gotten a little bored myself, so I guess I’ve needed to keep myself engaged.”

PROPORTION [prǝ-’pȯr-shǝn], noun: “Working in proportions is the most challenging, interesting way to design a collection. I do it every season.”

RELEVANCE [‘re-lǝ-vǝn(t)s], noun: “It’s important that you check in with yourself because there’s nothing worse than becoming irrelevant.”

RUNWAY [‘ren-’wā], noun: “My collections aren’t ever shown through the runway in a traditional sense. Everybody approaches the runway their own way… I just interpret it differently.”

SKETCH [‘skech], noun: “I have two ways of working: conceptual sketching and functional sketching. They’re both nice ways to put down on paper what the collection is going to look like before we get started.”

TAILORING [‘tā-lǝ-riη], noun: “Tailoring is fundamental to everything that I do. All the collections start from a structured piece of clothing. And tailoring can move into different worlds—sportswear, couture. It’s always tailoring.”

TARTAN [‘tär-tǝn], noun: “Tartan, a traditional Scottish fabric that combines various plaid patterns, is important for my collections because I like taking things that are very classic and reintroducing them to people in ways they haven’t seen before. I have my own registered tartan that is very classic in regards to the configuration, but the colors are true to the gray world of my collection.”

TWEED [‘twēd], noun: “I use tweed, which is usually woven from wool, all the time. It goes back to the idea of using a classic fabric and reinterpreting it. In our Fall 2024 Couture show, I created tweed out of all-muslin fabrics.”

UNIFORM [‘yü-ne-.fȯrm], noun: “Uniform and uniformity are, for me, ideas of adopting something for yourself and sticking to it. The rigor of staying true to that uniformity is very appealing to me. When I started, I wanted there to be an image in your head when you thought of my collection. That’s why my team and I are all represented in a gray-suited way. It’s also how I design. I design in a very uniform way in regards to discipline with which the collections are put together.”