Thom Browne is headed to Paris. He’ll show a couture collection for men and women on July 3, kicking off a year of activities marking the 20th anniversary of his business. Going on his past ready-to-wear shows in the City of Light, which have featured a life-size unicorn puppet and Pose’s MJ Rodriguez vamping to Aretha Franklin’s “Pink Cadillac,” it’s not going to be a small production. “It’s a huge honor to be able to show during couture, and I’m taking it seriously because we are representing American fashion,” he said.
For his pre-collections, he has a different agenda, though it wouldn’t be right to call these clothes more humble or more workaday than what he puts on the runway. Though suiting is Browne’s specialty, he’s no minimalist. Safe to say he’s actually more of a maximalist, one with a flair for layering and obsessive attention to sartorial minutiae.
That came into focus here with the opening series of looks, which featured strong shoulders, short sleeves (even shorter than usual), and in one case an inside-out construction that exposed the all the inner workings of a typical Thom Browne jacket including the shoulder caps, the seam bindings, and the canvas lining that gives his pieces the weight he likes.
He called this season “a little bit of a refresh, in regards to all the color currently going into stores.” Though he opened with black, gray, and navy, it wasn’t as strict as advertised. Some of the tweeds lavishly incorporated horsehair and his signature red, white, and blue grosgrain ribbon into their weaves, while other more traditional versions were woven in baby blue and soft orange. A silver foil look that combined a padded down coat, tailored jacket, and long kilt was an outlier, but it wasn’t the collection’s only bit of flash. A minidress with the same strong shoulders as the tailoring (it was built off of a tuxedo construction) was hand-embroidered in panels of shiny black sequins.
As for the lookbook’s flying sheep, Browne has such a hit on his hands with the Hector bags he’s modeled on his miniature wirehaired dachshund—he reports he sells more of them than any other kind—he’s expanding the menagerie.
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