Ground Control To Major Thom

Ivy Style revisits this piece we did on Thom Browne in 2008.

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Lately it seemed like Browne had receded into the confines of his tailor-shop-cum-laboratory, content to make his line in peace. But now, thanks to the December issue of GQ, in which Browne is named Designer of the Year, the hullabaloo is sure to begin again, and it’s doubtful that the rhetoric will have changed.

Like football, menswear is a game of inches, and for some the small measure of fabric that separates a trouser hem from no-break to flood-length, and from flood-length to up-in-the-stratosphere, is a sacred quantity, a measure ensconced in history since the time when men first shed their culottes and donned trousers.

Of course, trouser length has always been a matter of preference, but for Thom Browne’s detractors (Alan Flusser famously called Browne’s designs “the most irresponsible clothes I have ever seen in my 30 years in fashion”), the designer has found the line that separates the preferential from the tasteless and brazenly crossed it, bare ankles shining in the sunlight.

Lost in all the name-calling and rule-citing lies the real question: Why all the fuss about Thom Browne?  Ignore his conceptual runway stuff and what you have is a well made collection much more involved with the continuing tradition of American style than most other designers working today.

But for those who are anti-Thom, that’s part of the problem. Browne has struck a nerve with so many not because he messed with the suit, but because he messed with the quintessential American suit, the three-button, gray flannel, natural-shouldered suit.

To say Thom Browne looks like Pee-Wee Herman is inaccurate: He looks like J. Press on heroin. But who’s to say that J. Press (and American style in general) doesn’t need the occasional shot in the arm? How is Browne’s riff on the gray flannel suit any different than Sidney Winston’s scissor-happy experiments with patches of madras and tweed 50 years ago?

In GQ’s article, Browne reveals how traditional American clothing serves as his own source of inspiration, how nostalgia can transform a sense of history, and what can happen when that nostalgia is brought to the design table. The following excerpts are often interesting and sometimes bewildering:

He’s wearing a dark gray Thom Browne suit and a narrow tie cut from the same material. He could be an early-’60s banker, a defense contractor, an IBM executive studying a printout from a computer the size of a one-bedroom apartment. Except nobody at DuPont or Young & Rubicam dressed quite like this.

He looks like a time traveler, an emissary from planet 1958. The Man Who Fell to West 12th Street. Observe the exposed calf below his abbreviated pant leg, the severe brush cut on his peanut-shaped head, the shiny black personal-injury-lawyer briefcase on the floor by his feet. Greetings, rumpled humans.

Decisions, decisions. Browne likes John F. Kennedy’s two-button Brooks Brothers suits, less because he admires John F. Kennedy—“It’s nothing political at all”—and more because he likes the America that Kennedy lived in.

Early on, he’d wash vintage suits and throw them in the dryer. He was trying to make them look like Thom Browne suits before anybody knew what a Thom Browne suit was. He was thinking about that late-’50s-early-’60s organization-man moment, post–electric typewriter, pre–Meet the Beatles. He wanted a suit that looked the way he thought suits had looked back then. The distinction matters; the silhouette of the Thom Browne suit actually, technically started out as Browne misremembering classic American tailoring.

And when he borrows elements from womenswear, ties a guy up, dresses a guy like a bird, he’s not gluing new pages into the Preppy Handbook or imagining a world where JFK could greet the New Frontier in a jacket puffed out with tulle; he’s just trying to do something that hasn’t been done before.

(He buys the briefcases on eBay. They’re Samsonite, or something like it, and he thinks they’re perfect. “Some things are so perfect there’s no need to redesign them,” he says. “This is one of those things.” He feels this way about Sperry Top-Siders, too—“Good ol’ Sperry did a good job”—and Levi’s, although he doesn’t own jeans.)

Below are looks from Browne’s Black Fleece collection for Brooks Brothers. — ZACHARY DELUCA