In the season two finale of The Bear, head chef Carmy lays a Thom Browne box in front of sous-chef Sydney as the restaurant is about to open. She wears the white chef coat with the US designer’s stripes on the arm throughout the entire episode, despite the growing confusion and drama in the kitchen. Amazingly, she manages to keep it immaculate. Additionally miraculous for Thom Browne. The placement was a marketing success in a program that is praised for its use of apparel to tell stories.
From his grey-paneled office in midtown Manhattan, Browne adds, “I haven’t really caught up with the show. However, two PR professionals kindly add that the popular show’s creator Chris Storer is a longtime client.
The US designer may have been at the forefront of the fashion world for the previous two decades, constricting men’s clothes to the extreme and sending meticulously tailored gray suits, frequently with tight shorts instead of trousers, down the catwalk – as well as modeling the style himself. However, he is not well-known.
His style has recently been referred to as “impish and a little bit kinky” by The New Yorker, which is true, but it has also had a significant impact. The male silhouette has changed over time, getting smaller and tighter.
Look to Scott Parker, the former manager of Bournemouth, who recently wore a tight grey cardigan by Browne, or to Rishi Sunak, who recently found himself in hot water for his short-shorts. Men everywhere, from Downing Street to the football terraces, now appear smaller and pinched. Each one carried Browne’s aesthetic imprint. Since Giorgio Armani in the 1980s, he has perhaps done more to alter the male silhouette and defy the rules of menswear.
The Browne “penguin” silhouette is now regarded as “absolutely part of the fashion vocabulary,” according to Anna Wintour, publisher of US Vogue and the global chief content officer of Condé Nast. He entirely altered the way we perceive.
What motivates his designs that defy convention—are they a reversal of gender silhouettes, a manifestation of the male-to-male gaze, or the product of a bizarre, fetishistic fantasy? Whatever it is, Browne would be questioned about whether he realized his pants were too short and his suit was too little. He’d say, “No, it fits me just fine.” I want it to fit like this.
Simply put, why is it so brief? “It was just something I wanted to do,” he claims. “It wasn’t well-planned at all. Simply put, it was personal to me. I wanted to make sure I used concepts that people could grasp and presented them in a way that they could not.
He was born in 1965 in Allentown, Pennsylvania, attended Catholic school, and later pursued a career in economics.
2023 is an important year for him because it has been twenty years since he started his own label. He succeeded Tom Ford as chair of the Council of Fashion Designers of America in January, and to commemorate the occasion, he has published a monograph.
The brand has thrived on the back of global demand for sportswear, with tailoring that has brought personalized school uniforms into the office. Its longtime partner is Andrew Bolton, curator of the costume institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, home to the Met Ball. One customized Browne client comments, “With an S&M twist,” pointing out that the style has the appearance of a corset that pushes out the chest and arms.
Bolton and Browne are a power couple in New York’s fashion world. He states simply, “Our life is our work,” and then Browne plays with conventions while Bolton gets to interpret and explain the results. They live in a mansion on the Upper East Side that was constructed for a railroad family member of the Vanderbilts. They don’t, however, go out and follow TikTok-driven restaurant trends. They watch Brideshead Revisited once a year at home, where they spend the most of their time.
Because he read Moby-Dick as a young lad, that book is the focus of his collection this season. For guys, it features a Harris tweed skirt in a dark green length below the knee. It is a manifesto that you may wear to the office. He argues, “I think males should be permitted to wear whatever because we live in such a world. Although I don’t really care if anyone wears it, I believe it looks excellent and is an intriguing idea for anyone who does.
