“I knew I had to stay in business. I'm stubborn, but I'm not
stupid, ”designer Thom Browne told BoF about the balance between the concept
and the business of his brand. "Fashion is a corporate. As abstract as you
want to be, you need to make sure you approach it like a business. There must
be a commercial element in what you do.
Browne understands both sides of the coin.
For one thing, he's a showman whose fashion show theater
involved models tied to beds and emerging from coffins. For a particularly
memorable men's fashion show of spring 2013, set in a Parisian garden, the
silver minotaurs heralded a show of men dressed as life-size Slinkies. For
their female debut for Fall / Winter 2011, which took place at the New York
Public Library, models wearing twisted versions of the nun's garb were stripped
naked by male models dressed as priests.
Browne estimations that he sells 80 to 90 percent of his display
pieces.
But in an apparent
paradox, the designer, whose hair is cut with military precision, is best known
for his shrunken gray suits inspired by the 1950s and 1960s, short for the arms
and legs, as well as for their very easy to wear. mesh, with the subtle
tricolor stripe that has become his signature.
Today, the collection is stocked by more than 160 retailers.
A collaboration with US
department store Brooks Brothers, dubbed Black Fleece, is now in its seventh
year. And last March, Browne opened the second retail outlet (his first
independent flagship of his outside the United States) in the Aoyama district
of Tokyo. Michelle Obama level chose a silk jacquard coat also uniform on or
after her very young collection of womenswear to wear to her husband's second
inauguration as president of the United States, making Thom Browne for the
first time a a name known to taxi drivers and fashionistas alike. "He
really put women in front of people and made them realize that now I make women
too," Browne said.
Born in 1965, mid-seven into a strict Irish Catholic family,
Browne grew up in the town of Rust Belt in Allentown,
Pennsylvania, where fashion barely registered. "I never thought about
it," he recalls. “You hardly even knew it existed. You went to the stores
and you didn't even think about how the clothes were designed and who made
them. In a way, it was more of a commodity. "
Browne's children's wardrobe, however:
gray flannel pants and
jackets for winter; Navy blue blazers and khaki pants in summer certainly
inspired the designer's appealing. "I think a lot of periods you see a
true American awareness, and sometimes an East Coast sensibility, in the
collection," he says. "It was really what we wore when we grew up:
very classic American casual clothes and dress."
With style not yet on his radar,
Browne's benefits lay in "sports and school, that was
it." From the age of nine he began to swim for several hours a day. Later,
while studying at Notre Dame, a Catholic university in Indiana, he was a member
of the swim team. So it's perhaps not surprising that athletic references often
crop up in his work, from tennis racket print trench coats to white soccer
jersey mesh lined tuxedos. "There stay a lot of sports situations in my
collections, in the fabrics I wear, in the sensitivity of the clothes,"
says Browne.
His immediate family was full of briefs,
doctors, or entrepreneurs
- "with all of us in our family doing something and doing it right was
something my parents really stressed out" - but after graduation After
graduation, Browne moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting. With his
athleticism and chiseled beauty, he has had some success as a commercial actor
(there's a Motrin commercial somewhere in which he plays a runner with a sore
side). But more importantly, he began investigating with vintage costumes,
washing them, then tossing them in the dryer and cutting them to create his
signature shrunken figure.
In
1998, Browne stopped acting and decided to move to New York; In less than two
weeks, he had a wholesale job at Giorgio Armani. "I really just looked-for
a job and it was cool," he recalls. Soon after, he moved to Club Monaco,
where he perfected
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