Schoolboy Chic

“The materials he uses are really interesting, and he combines things in unexpected ways,” says Brooke Hodge, curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She is impressed with one jacket in particular, where Browne used a football jersey mesh over a white cotton piqué—a rare example of athletic clothing going formal. As a guest curator at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, Hodge selected Browne’s work for inclusion in the institution’s current National Design Triennial, a move that may surprise museum-goers who are used to seeing exhibitions focused predominantly on women’s clothing. “Menswear hardly ever gets shown in exhibitions because you’re always dealing with the same components,” she explains. “With a woman’s outfit, you have more surface so there’s more room for innovation.” Browne’s genius lies in the fact that he’s figured out how to take classic men’s garments in new directions without transforming them into pieces that are unrecognizable.

Even with his most conventional offerings—the slim, short suits in worsted wool that make up the core of his business—Browne likes to see a few rumples mixed in to play down the perfection of the tailoring. That’s why you’ll never see him button the tips of his collar and why his henchmen wear wrinkled shirts and scuffed shoes. Although it’s calculated, the look is meant to be casual and confident. “There’s nothing worse than seeing somebody who looks too perfectly pressed and like they spend too much time on themselves,” he says. “Clothes are made to be worn. [A wrinkled shirt] gives the suit a really confident, easy feeling, which makes it cooler. The suit is very seriously made, so the last thing you want is for it to look too serious.” In other words, even though you may have just dropped $3,800 US on one of his creations, the idea is that your outfit should still look as though you’ve just thrown it all together.

Yes, $3,800 (and up). To be fair, the prices are driven by the high-end materials and meticulous tailoring—aspects that Browne says he’s not willing to compromise on. But the reality is that although he may visualize indie rockers when he’s designing, few of them will actually get to wear his suits. Instead, the people buying his wares tend to be young, stylish professionals and, quite unexpectedly, the odd card-carrying member of the establishment. A story in the New York Times reported that even Ronald O. Perelman, a sixty-four-year-old businessman featured on the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans, owns four Thom Browne suits. And just in case the contradiction wasn’t already apparent, that same story named perennial hipster David Bowie as another customer. Defining the typical Thom Browne buyer, it seems, is a nearly impossible task.

Equally surprising is the fact that many of Browne’s customers, after being drawn to his signature look, are having their pants hemmed long enough to cover their ankles. An insecure designer might worry that such alterations were watering down his creations, but not Browne. “What’s most interesting to me,” he says, “is that they know that’s what they want, as opposed to asking me ‘How should I have it done?’ If you ask me, I’ll tell you you should have it short. But that’s what I find truly refreshing in guys—when they do know what they want.”