Thom Browne invited fashion folk to stop and smell the roses this afternoon, with a show set that was straight out of the gardens of Versailles. Conjuring weird and wonderful landscapes is Browne’s strong suit; hence the flowers were a surrealist twist on the real thing, fashioned from classic seersucker cotton. There was a fountain cut from the same cloth in the middle of the runway with a particularly attention-grabbing water feature: its cheeky little cherub appeared to be taking a pee.
The American prepster has always offered a wellspring of inspiration for Browne. Each season he manages to splice and dice those unmistakable WASP-y dress codes with his own broad-ranging lexicon of historical and art-world obsessions. For Spring he was drawn towards the unabashed decadence of France before the Revolution. Panniers are easily the most unexpected trend to have surfaced this season, showing up on runways first in London with Matty Bovan, then again in Paris at Loewe, Balenciaga, and in markedly iconoclastic form at Rick Owens. With models in towering wigs and powdered pink faces, Browne’s vision of the 18th-century silhouette aligned most closely with the original. Case in point: Anna Cleveland teetered down the runway in the brand’s new floating seersucker mules wearing a dress that owed its waist-whittling line to traditional corsetry. There was often a layer cake of prettiness underneath the rigorous feminine architecture: petticoats and ruffled bloomers in the softest pastel shades, for example. Browne hardly plays by conventional gender rules from head to toe, however. His signature gray flannel suits were stripped back to their red, white, and blue lining in places, revealing traditional men’s boxer shorts that were buoyed by suspenders.
While other designers have made the switch to co-ed runway shows, Browne still presents his menswear and womenswear separately, the old-fashioned way. More often than not though, the two collections are in conversation with each other, as was the case this season. Where Marie Antoinette provided a radical urgency to Browne’s men’s show in Paris this past June, opening up a conversation about gender that has been rumbling through fashion for the last couple of years, her influence failed to have the same political resonance in the context of his women’s offering, especially when you factor in the number of times the ill-fated French queen has been evoked by designers for inspiration in the past.
Still, when it comes to pure flights of fancy and exquisite handwork, Browne is hard to beat. In a season that was brimming with alternative bridal options, this collection had several compelling options. The finale dress worn by the gorgeous Alek Wek was a good example, furnished with a cascading bustled train that would look dreamy coming down the aisle.
