Thom Browne’s shows always come with a narrative: This one was Tom Brown’s Schooldays as set in a midwinter, sylvan Narnia (with pigtails, and without the violence). The scene was a snow-floored forest scattered with saplings and divided by a long line of camp beds, upon each of which was a rolled-up sleeping bag. Two tall fairy godfathers/alfresco dorm monitors in full-skirted white dresses worn under fur vests and netted balaclavas emerged. They idly wandered, sometimes picking up the snow and letting it fall through their fingers.
This was when the collection proper started coming out. Around halfway through it a young man wearing a backflap-less gray union suit, gray socks, and a long pom-pom-peaked gray beanie joined the floor, clutching a teddy bear. Like all the models wearing the collection, he sported a pair of long pigtails. The first of about 30 others who would follow, he made his way to his allotted camp bed, unrolled his bag, slipped in, and pulled on a gray leather sleeping mask. The full-dressed dorm monitors came along to brush off the snow and tuck him (and teddy) in.
At the end of the show, when all the beds were filled and all the looks had come and gone, the dorm monitors receded to the back of the room and mimed switching off the lights. The lights went off.
That’s when we all jumped up to have a look at the models, still faux-asleep on their camp beds. Intarsia-imposed upon every down-filled sleeping bag was a slim-fitting gray Thom Browne suit—the emblematic ensemble of this designer. “The sleeping bag was the gray suit of this season,” he said backstage. “I think a lot of people see what I do as just tailoring, but there is so much sportswear within the collection as well, and that’s been probably the most recent development.”
This was certainly a collection of luxuriously elevated, tailoring-inflected but sportswear-leaning garments: sportswear that looked stitched. Typically but not exclusively, the fabrication of the outerwear reflected the garments beneath. So a crimson rib-knit, double-breasted coat—canvassed but also padded with piumino—was worn with rib-knit blue pants and a white rib jacket beneath. A down-filled black corduroy parka similarly defined the rest of its look, as did outerwear in Fair Isle, pinstripe, chalk stripe, and check. Sometimes there was a more mixed-up look—say, a white cloak with mink muff worn over shorts and gaiters. Special house-code asides included the down-filled suit overlaid with lace depicting Browne’s hound, Hector, plus a similarly patterned fur throw. Watching this show it was hard not to flash back to Browne’s recently ceased Gamme Bleu outings for Moncler. Whether for that house or his own, his facility for technical, tailored, and luxuriously fabricated winterwear—shorts aside—was evident today.
