When Thom Browne was a baby he got a pair of baby shoes. Formless moccasins. Genderless, darling little bootees. And they were never thrown away. For it is, apparently, a rather beautiful Browne family tradition to dip all Browne newcomers’ first pair of shoes in gold as remembrance and celebration. Tonight, placed in a vitrine and given the addition of a tricolor Browne label, these teeny-weeny shoes were at the center of a powerfully transgressive show.
“I like the idea that when you are a baby you wear pretty much the same clothing as your brothers and sisters. And I think that culture dictates which way and what kind of clothing you wear—but it is nice that you can pretty much do whatever you want,” said the designer backstage.
But of course we don’t wear whatever we want, do we? Because there are some things we are conditioned not to want—to not even consider. Convention dictates that a whole swathe of clothing options are exclusive to one gender or another. Actually, it is men who are pretty much the more hidebound gender in this regard. We still celebrate Le Tuxedo for women. But when, apart from the amazing but culturally specific outliers of drag or traditional dress, do we celebrate Le Skirt for men?
Tonight Browne remedied that deficiency by proposing that there is no pale beyond which we should ever feel prohibited from dressing. The poles of gender norms were represented by two vitrines on either end of a runway, bathed in the music from the film Orlando. In the first the models passed was a pair of gold-plated flat brogues. In the other, closest to the photographers, was a pair of gold-plated heeled brogues, around 2 inches high.
Every model wore the heeled version, and as they passed a third, central vitrine that contained Browne’s own baby shoes, they cast a meaningful sideways glance at it. “I wanted them to look at the baby shoes, reminiscing back to the day it all started. When they could choose whichever path they wanted,” said Browne. In this alternate world his men chose a different path. Browne had adapted his seasonal women’s collection for his male models, and presented a broad swathe of skirts—pencil, midi, maxi, pleated—in mostly masculine gray wools. There were also short-shorts and culottes, worn under cropped jackets, and a couple of long dresses too. Sometimes the tails of elongated shirts acted as underskirts beneath the more conformist jackets above. Some pieces featured another golden child in Browne’s world: an indented golden profile of Hector, the famous fashion hound he co-adores with Andrew Bolton. Each look’s pair of heeled brogues was topped by a pair of mismatched socks, one plain black, one white-striped, which reinforced the sense of stretched dialectic.
Most of the looks were in classic menswear materials: seersucker, wool, poplin. But at the last, Browne presented an old-school couture-style wedding look: From the front it was a narrow-fit black tux, but from the back the view was of a full-skirted wedding dress, with the bride’s sleeve inlaid into the small of his back to allow him to clutch his bouquet.
Browne insisted afterward that every single skirt, heel, and culotte in this collection will go on sale. The emphasis on menswear-staple colors and fabrics had been to increase the impact of the garments’ transgression, and simultaneously also made it feel much less like drag. They will be purchasable in more zingy colorways, as well as tweeds and Madras checks.
“All of it is being offered,” he said. “I think it looks amazing. It takes somebody with a lot of confidence to wear it, but I just feel like, Why can’t this be men’s clothes, too?”
No reason, apart from our assumptions.
Heading out, I asked a muscled young model, a butch-looking Adonis in a pleated skirt, heels, and a shoulder-robed cropped jacket, how it felt. “It feels . . . great!” he grinned. He narrowed his eyes at my saggy, stretching chinos and sweat-stained army jacket. “You should try it, man!” Why not?
