This acclaimed designer is one to look out for at this year’s Met Gala
Thom Browne’s designs have commanded awards shows, Met Galas and global runways for years. Just how did he build an unending cultural relevance?
Thom Browne appears exactly as expected. Seated in his New York headquarters with signature closely cropped haircut, dark eyebrows above a square jaw, he is wearing a slate cardigan, graphite blazer and matching tie tucked into smoke super 120’s tailored shorts. Of all these constants of his appearance, the most striking, and famous, is that palette of pewter and lead – variations of what the brand refers to as medium grey. The colour has become shorthand for an entire world of the designer’s making. Grey is to Thom Browne what robin’s-egg blue is to Tiffany & Co. and what rosso Valentino is to its namesake.
Colour synonymy doesn’t happen overnight. Nor does becoming a global designer, couturier and head of a brand valued at US half a billion dollars in 2018. He’s also joined
a select few who have shifted how men dress. Women too. Officially, he’s been dressing them since a Barneys New York capsule collection in 2007, and unofficially long before that. Once an insider name, increasingly the 59-year-old designer has found himself as the sought-after choice for a slew of celebrities, including Addison Rae, Ayo Edebiri, Zendaya, Troye Sivan, Cardi B and Gigi Hadid, who wore him to the Met Gala. Then there are NBA players like Russell Westbrook who put his pleated skirt onto bestseller lists for men. Adrien Brody chose a Thom Browne three-piece mohair tuxedo and wingtips to collect a Golden Globe this year, and rapper Doechii accepted her Grammy for Best Rap Album in grey pannier pants and performed in a suit, then underwear, by Browne as part of a rotation of four custom looks, setting the internet alight. Late last year saw the premiere of a documentary on his work, The Man Who Tailors Dreams, by director Reiner Holzemer, and he’s just flown back from a Palm Beach store opening.
It’s an interesting turn of events for someone who, as a child, wasn’t interested in fashion. “I never thought about that when I was growing up,” he says plainly. He’s seated in a wooden chair as the end of the working day approaches. The crispness of the buttoned-down Thom Browne look, defined by single-breasted grey suits cut tighter and cropped higher for a constricted effect, is slightly rumpled. It gives the impression of both statesman and someone who works hard. Appointed as chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) in 2023, he is both. How did someone who’s chosen the most anti-fashion of shades end up, by all metrics, at the industry’s apex?
“The most important thing for my parents was to do well in school and also do some type of sport, but then my mother was also wanting to expose us to art and we all played an instrument,” he offers of his earliest steps toward creativity. “It was something that was very important to my parents – making sure we were more well-rounded than just either athletes or good students.”
One of seven sporty, high-achieving siblings growing up in Pennsylvania, Browne detoured into a consulting job in New York before moving to Los Angeles. “I have really good friends in LA who were living creative lives. And so definitely it hasn’t been just myself pulling it from myself,” he says of developing a point of view, with no formal fashion training, that would eventually underpin a global brand. Some creatives he connected to after living with interior designer Paul Fortune went on to become motivators and collaborators. “Definitely Rick [Owens] and Michèle [Lamy], I met in LA and were very inspiring,” he recalls. “My friend Johnson [Hartig, Libertine designer] was inspiring. My friend Sarah Jane [Wilde] was always inspiring.” She now designs Thom Browne jewellery. “That really sparked the fire that started it when I moved back to New York.”
It ignited as five grey suits in abbreviated proportions that are still at the heart of the label. They were an alternative take on how one of the most powerfully symbolic pieces in modern western society, and its most prosaic, could look. Uniquely, it was one of those rare ideas that came out fully formed, rich with potential. The cut, leaning mid-century, was interesting to men who wore tailoring but recognised some subversion in the proportions, while its quality, thanks to an Italian tailor in Queens, was irresistible. It became the solid scaffold from which to build a multifaceted brand. “I met Thom Browne when he was doing a few shirts, but they were just perfect,” says Sarah Andelman. Founder of the influential Paris boutique Colette, she was one of the first, along with Bergdorf Goodman, to pick up Browne’s pieces. “I love how he expanded his world with always the same high level of exigence and creativity within a special frame.”
Having worked at Armani then Club Monaco, at the time owned by Ralph Lauren, Browne was exposed to what a brand with a full world view looked like. In the way we know how a Ralph Lauren person might holiday, what kind of car they’d drive, Browne has created a Thom Browne life, bedding and childrenswear inclusive. His navy, red and white grosgrain, inspired by school-days swimming ribbons and appearing as a hook loop on the backs of blazers or the trim of a shirt, was thoughtful branding from the start. His devotion to the aesthetic permeates his life, down to his home, his stores with furniture from French architect Jacques Adnet and American modernist furniture designer Paul McCobb, and his personal wardrobe.
“I think the rigour and being somewhat singular in how I wanted to live my life or how I wanted to express myself was always part of who I was,” says Browne. “And I think it’s a little bit of, maybe, the stubborn side of who I am as a person. I always had a point of view. I wanted to make sure people saw that this is what I wanted to do, and I want you to see, I guess, my collections purely through my eyes and exactly how I want you to see them.” He mentions consistency when defining success. “Success is really just being able to stay true to that pure idea I had at the beginning and, hopefully, however big and however many years in the future, you still feel that pure idea.”
Some have questioned the constraints of such an unwavering vision. Cathy Horyn in The New York Times wrote early on: “His irony can sometimes feel like a hammer.” CEO of the CFDA Steven Kolb describes his singular focus as an asset: “He doesn’t follow trends. He builds his own world and remains committed to it. That kind of consistency, along with his uncompromising choices, has allowed him to scale without losing what makes his work so distinct.”
Browne doesn’t assert that everyone should submit to his vision. When celebrities choose him – and they do, including LeBron James who bought suits for his Cleveland Cavaliers teammates – he’s genuinely touched. As happened with Doechii. “The idea that she chose something that was so fundamental to everything I do – that very tailored, grey-suited and grey-tailored idea – and how she made it relevant to her moment and to a totally different new audience I think was really special,” he says. “Being on my own as an independent designer, not really one of the established houses of the last hundred years, I still always feel like it’s really special that people come to me, because they can go to anyone else. And I never take it for granted.”
He’s also a dreamer of wildly creative showscapes complementing equally fantastical clothing. He has transfigured garden statues into models, cast a menagerie of 3D animals in men’s suiting fabrics, erected cathedrals, and held a futuristic lunar Olympics. For autumn/winter ’25/’26, 2,000 origami birds alighted on his set. His most recent couture collection, his second after debuting in 2023, reached its crescendo with a gold beaded jacket requiring 11,000 hours of work. “I hope people see it’s not only the clothes, that it is the story that is surrounding the collection,” he says. “I definitely wanted to do something that really transcended fashion.” The shows provide the framework for provocation: how can a suit hold ideas about freedom, transformation, flight? “That’s the reason the shows became what they became and what they have become in regards to taking the collections and making sure people see them through a story.”
The tantalising thing about Thom Browne is he defies neat categorisation: he’s neither a wholly self-serious designer nor pure dissenter. “There was something nice about the days when everyone had to put a suit on to go to work,” he told US GQ in 2008. He did well in school and thrived in competitive, repetitive swimming. He didn’t fight a disciplined life. He has also said he gets bored by normal things. He sees that his suit walks a line between convention and subversion, but shies away from declaring deep political meaning around gender, power and sex. “I think it’s maybe because it’s such a classic idea in such a fashion context sometimes,” he says. “Which is, I think, where the provocation comes in.” He’s quick to suggest others don’t see it as that disruptive at all. “Sometimes people run away from it so much because they think it’s too classic.”
But the tension between provocation and convention is where the Thom Browne frisson happens. “I love the idea of uniformity, and individuality coming from that uniformity,” he says. The suit becomes like a scientific control, the individual personality exists in relief against this: in the layering of a cardigan, how many buttons are undone, the context. This is especially relevant when convention and traditional dress codes are being questioned by fashion against the backdrop of a conservative world. This month’s Met Gala, with the theme Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, examines resistance through dress and the way an oppressed diaspora appropriated the codes of their oppressors. Browne will no doubt have a presence, along with partner Andrew Bolton, curator in charge at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Being at the fore of the cultural conversation has been hard won. It’s what informs Browne’s leadership at the CFDA. “[It] was really making sure that everybody realises it has to all start from creativity,” he says of his mission. “I think the world really needs, even though we don’t sometimes realise it, creative minds to really keep things moving forward. Without creativity, I think everything will not progress in the best way.” Kolb recognises a rare mix of drive and dedication to creativity in Browne. “As a creative, Thom is incredibly focused,” he says. “As CFDA chairman, he maintains that same clarity. He deeply cares about the future of American fashion and shows up with genuine commitment.”
“I think it’s really a shame how business treats creative people sometimes and doesn’t really understand the time it takes to create and establish something that’s important in a creative world,” Browne notes. Does he feel the pressure to keep lifting the game every collection? “It seemed to have been a lot easier earlier on.
I think, over the years, because I want each collection to be better and better and the next one to be better than the last, the pressure of topping the last one sometimes makes it maybe a little harder.”
He has coping strategies. “I drink a little bit more, probably,” he says, laughing. “No, I mean, it is easy because Andrew and I, we have a really nice quiet life at home, and it’s not so hard because I love doing what I do.” Bolton is a trusted sounding board. “I have really good employees and, of course, I respect their opinions. Andrew’s is probably the one opinion I value the most.”
The parameters for success he sets for himself, and he hopes for other designers at the CFDA, are bound in his commitment to creativity. “You also have to gauge success in regards to …” He pauses. “It’s not about being famous or being rich. It’s really about creating something or being true to that creativity and being very happy and content with that being your level of success.” His response is classically Browne – clear but faintly elusive, never quite giving away the exact depths beneath the buttoned-down grey exterior.
“I love the idea that people see that very focused vision of what I create,” he says, satisfied, then resumes: “But also, there’s still so much more that people don’t realise I do. There’s so much there.”
This story is from the May issue of Vogue Australia. On sale now.
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