Thom Browne shows are not unlike a tea ceremony. Stylized and precise: reliably very late and very slooow. But when you get your cup of tea in the end, it satisfies. Today Browne brewed a bubble-wrapped 12-chapter meditation on the feminine potential of the structure of tailored men’s clothing, in which each chapter had three parts. What follows is a Grammarly-simple summation of what was a very carefully wrought—if perhaps a little cold and inconsiderate of the wearer—lyrical poem in clothing that was staged in a Bubble Wrap set.
The prologue saw eight guys in brimless stovepipes, gloves, and dresses made from Bubble Wrap emerge from backstage and stalk around the 36 bubble-wrapped packages on display stands that ran the course of the runway. Like all of the models in this show, their faces were encased in puckered transparent plastic, as if bubble-wrapped. Then, to a mournful oboe, their master of ceremonies (whose gray marshmallow-whip dye job and Bubble Wrap frock coat made him resemble a deep-frozen Tom Hulce in Amadeus) ushered them to the sidelines.
Then came the main movement. This was 12 groups of looks, each three looks strong, in which the first was invariably a kink-ified and corseted bold-shouldered expression—atop brogued Mary Janes—of a look featuring fabrics and materials that are long-term meat and drink to Thom Browne. In part two of each chapter, the first look was collapsed into a single garment as a trompe l’oeil dress. And in the third part, each element from the first look was revived, but turned radically inside out or upside down to create what were in essence lavishly draped womenswear looks assembled from a bricolage of the first part menswear source material. Got it?
Finally, epilogue: Frozen Tom Hulce returned with his retainers to reveal what was under each of those display stands—tiny little felt versions of all the looks we had just seen.
Backstage, Browne said in womenswear he starts his collections by making these perfectly formed little renderings of the looks to come, but that it was the first time he had transferred the process to “menswear.” He added: “I thought it was really interesting to show how the collection started, the small mannequins of each look. And as opposed to a finale to show this beginning of the collection at the end.”
Given that the collection was so overtly feminized, what did this transfer of a womenswear process to his menswear signify? “I think almost a feminine womenswear approach is interesting for guys nowadays. It was interesting for me because the shape of the jackets and the corsetry underneath it look really, really good . . . and I love the idea of all of the pieces coming into a trompe l’oeil dress. And I love the idea of guys wearing dresses. I think it’s an interesting time, that guys are really open to so much more right now.”
Browne added that from his authorial eye there was a hierarchy in each of the 12 chapters’ trilogy of looks, whose order went: “good, better, best.” An exercise in turning “menswear” into “womenswear,” it made you reconsider as fundamentally dubious the arbitrary differences between the two that we are so culturally ingrained to accept and perpetuate. The only frustration was that when you jumped up and down on that Bubble Wrap, it didn’t pop.
