Inside, it’s another world: a quiet masculine den crossed with a 1960s office building—terrazzo floors, a heavy wooden desk, brass lamps, and no-nonsense rolling racks for the clothes. Speech reverberates off hard blue-grey walls. Milling about the store are a handful of other guys, all dressed in tightly cropped pants matched with super-slim jackets or sweaters. In the middle of it all stands Browne himself, expecting me. With an athletic build and a haircut an army recruiter would love, Browne’s compact frame is wrapped in an immaculate grey suit consisting of a jacket that’s snug across the shoulders, short in the arms, and ungenerous in length, and pants that rise up to his navel (and yes, they’re hemmed well above his sockless ankles too). Underneath the jacket, he wears a wrinkled white shirt with a slinky, skinny grey tie tucked neatly into a V-neck cardigan. The look is at once overgrown schoolboy and mid-century salesman—and it just might be the hottest new thing in men’s fashion.
The forty-one-year-old Browne is in the business of saving the men’s suit from its own stuffy image. At a time when it seems everybody from pop stars to bankers has taken to wearing jeans and T-shirts, Browne says the suit can be “anti-establishment” because it runs contrary to today’s accepted convention of dressing down. “You are so much more unique when you dress this way because you’re not like everyone else in khakis and polos or jeans and T-shirts,” he tells me later, perched on an ottoman in the rearmost section of his store, where he attends to clients who come calling for his creations. “[My customer] is anybody who’s very confident and very independent in how they live their lives. It’s not somebody who looks at the fashion magazines and wants to wear the latest and the greatest. It’s someone who is really his own person, who is not so fussy, who likes to have a good time, and who doesn’t get preoccupied with stupid little things.”
Rockers aside, the buyers at Bergdorf were among the first members of the establishment to take Browne seriously. He launched his inaugural ready-to-wear collection in 2003, and in 2004 it was carried by only two stores: Bergdorf and Colette, the avant-garde hipster boutique in Paris. But other temples of fashion, including Barneys New York and Harvey Nichols in London, followed suit, and now sixteen choosy stores sell his goods worldwide.
Browne’s aesthetic arrived seemingly out of nowhere. Unlike most contemporary fashion designers, he never attended design school, has no real formal training, and indeed has no background in the craft of making clothes. “My school was basically on the streets,” he says. “I’ve always worn jackets, trousers, and suits because that’s what I’m most comfortable in. But I was always looking for a younger version of it.”
Browne was born and raised in Allentown, Pennsylvania, as one of seven children in an upper-middle-class family. “My parents were attorneys, and everybody else in my family became some type of professional,” he says. “We all grew up in Brooks Brothers navy jackets and khakis and flannels and things like that—very good all-American clothes.” When it came time to leave home for school, he enrolled in the business program at the Catholic university Notre Dame in Indiana. After graduation, figuring that he didn’t want to dive headfirst into business, he moved to Los Angeles and took a run at becoming an actor. A few years later he moved to New York, where a friend helped him land a job working in Giorgio Armani’s showroom. From there he skipped to Club Monaco and worked his way up through the design department. But he wasn’t happy—he still couldn’t find clothes he wanted to wear.
The breakthrough moment came in 2001 when Browne designed five suits for himself with the cuts that have become his trademark and wore them every day as he went about his business in Manhattan. “I wanted to see if people liked it,” he says. “The reaction was really good. People were asking me where I got them.” Those inquiries led to a few commissions, and Browne began seeing clients in his apartment. When business picked up, he established a small showroom in the city’s Meatpacking District. Since then, things have taken off. In 2006, Browne moved to his present 2,500-square-foot boutique on Hudson Street, just months after the Council of Fashion Designers of America named him menswear designer of the year.
Besides the short and slim cuts, Browne is also steadfastly committed to quality. To study one of his jackets up close is to see craftsmanship of the highest order—flawlessly formed shoulders, pronounced yet meticulous stitching along narrow lapels, and functioning buttonholes lined with grosgrain ribbon at the cuffs. Browne’s secret weapon for producing such garments? An extremely experienced tailor whose name he keeps to himself. “I wanted [the suits] to be really, really beautifully hand-done, and [for that] you need somebody who has been doing it for a long time,” he says, pointing out that none of his garments are sewn by his own hand. “I work with an older Italian man who has been doing this for sixty years. I know exactly what I want, and he’s one of the rare, really good hand tailors who is actually open to doing new things.”
And, whoever he is, it’s a good thing Browne’s tailor is receptive to experimentation, not just taking hems in a few extra inches. Because with all that quality, Browne likes to blend in a little subversion. His spring 2007 collection is a case in point. The choice of materials ranges from the unconventional (grey wool overlaid with a Swiss dot sheer, an overcoat made out of aluminum window screening) to the downright bizarre (a jacket covered with downy white feathers that might have belonged at one time to an albino ostrich, sheer pants that show off a wearer’s boxer shorts, suit jackets with detachable bustles that plump up the rear vents).
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