The canopy-free parasols were a meteorologically ironic insertion into this typically sumptuous Thom Browne show, given the punishing heat in the glass-roof École des Beaux-Arts this afternoon. They were just one small part of a theatrical runway fantasy, in which Browne—recast as Monsieur Brun in his show notes—imagined himself as a host at what he called a Versailles country club.
Playing Brun was no less than James Whiteside, one of American Ballet Theatre’s principal dancers, who emerged palely powdered with ceruse and tricolor blue bee-stung lips, wearing a high-cut seersucker tutu. He cut a marvelous swath as he prepared for his garden party. This involved overseeing the preparation of 10 “statues,” which were in fact 10 very game models clad in horizontally enormous 2-D trompe l’oeil renderings of the 3-D outfits worn beneath them, which were short suits in various shades of seersucker accessorized with seersucker footballs, basketballs, and baseballs. They were shod in black and white brogued basketballs topped by pulled-high mismatched sport socks. Their outfits were revealed by attendants in sport shorts, pointy-toe corespondent shoes, and Browne-skinny jackets whose skirts barely brushed the matching codpiece/jockstrap also worn below.
All this, mind you, before the first look of the collection. Browne’s guests strode onto his metaphorical lawn with more corespondents, these with a curved 2 inches or so exposed inset heel that elevated the ball of the foot above the flat sole beneath it. The outfits, like the latticed football helmet worn by one of the attendants, made lavish use of the wide-to-each-side silhouette created by Marie Antoinette–era pannier dresses. In the pieces adorned with prep-staple marine patching there was another irony in the fashion interplay of whale and whalebone (happily, though, no whale tail). Against that broadening ying tugged the narrowing yang of corsetry, from which were suspended literally drop-waist skirts. Pretty much everything was seersucker, sometimes patched, sometimes fringed, sometimes embroidered—but always seersucker.
The American tradition of men’s dress from which Browne mines his material is via Ivy League, rooted in sport, and here there were sportif accessories galore: basketball bags, soccer ball bags, football bags—a lot of ball bags, basically. Some of the seersucker panniers worn on the shoulder lent a prettily garlanded, football-echoing bulk to the form within, and one exposed pannier skirt featured seersucker balls that rested between it and either side of the wearer’s hip. Browne is a highly popular designer among professional sports players, of course, and he explained today’s play thus: “I’ve always use sports as a reference, and today, playing with the severity of the 18th-century reference, grounding it in sports, was a way to bring it into the men’s world.”
