Parisian eyebrows must certainly have been raised by the sight of the comings and goings from Mr. Thom Browne’s academy—sorry, his showroom—on the Avenue Montaigne last week. Is there any other company on earth whose adult staff dresses in gray school uniform—box pleat skirts for women, shorts for men, shirts and ties for both? His ability to face both ways—toward absolute conservatism on the one hand, and wild eccentricity on the other—has no equal in fashion, or anywhere else come to that. It gives even a visit to view the Resort collection an unnerving frisson.
Still, the number of store executives sitting at desks placing orders says that the school of Thom Browne has international appeal. This season, the subject on his curriculum was a refresher in “the true meaning of American sportswear”—athleisure in its sloppy modern sense, no relation to streetwear, but a return to what originally made American fashion distinctive: luxuriously rendered clothes referencing tennis, golf, sailing, and so on. They are serious clothes, these, what with the extraordinary way they are made, but subverted somewhat by the playfully surreal way Browne elongates, styles, and shoots them.
It was a collection of two halves: city clothes (quite a few gray uniform variants, with piqué shirts grown into long underdresses) and preppy summer vacationwear. Close up, there was a pristine, breathtaking prettiness in the candy-striped shirting pieces, be they a blazer, a suit, or a corseted bustier dress. The specialness of the detail, in the form of tiny raw edges or extraordinarily-embroidered sequined beach motifs, rewards all study.
