There is currently a class about the designer Thom Browne being taught not, as one might expect, at Parsons or the Fashion Institute of Technology or even Central Saint Martins, but at the University of Notre Dame. And not by a business professor, or an art professor, but by a philosophy professor.
A philosophy professor?
Mr. Browne, who became famous as a proponent of a new kind of tailoring — shrunken gray suits and shorts suits that subverted midcentury clichés and turned them into something almost illicit — may be America’s great fashion ideologue, as well as one of its success stories. He is an apostle for the importance of imagination, the kind that goes beyond just aesthetics to identity-building, and taps into emotion as well as silhouette.
That, in fact, holds that the two are inextricable: What you put on your outside should, and does, change how you feel on your inside.
That sort of theorizing is rarely associated with New York designers, who have often been stereotyped as too commercial and market-oriented, focused to their detriment on predictability and functionality, not invention. It’s a generalization that is increasingly passé, however. And if Mr. Browne has his way, it may finally be overwritten.
This month, he became the chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, a post he assumed with the goal of redefining the image of American fashion, and on Tuesday night, in a black box theater on the second floor of the Shed in Hudson Yards, he showed everyone exactly what that meant.
Eight tons of sand had been trucked in and scattered across the floor to make a giant clock-shaped desert, with a life-size biplane crashed in the middle. Overhead dangled a universe’s worth of planets and stars. As the soundtrack ticked off the minutes, guests and celebrities filed in: Queen Latifah, Lil Nas X, Christine Baranski. By the time Erykah Badu arrived, swaddled in a giant plaid coat, 40 minutes late, Mr. Browne’s version of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “The Little Prince” could finally begin: a fashion opera in five acts, built on the base of a mid-calf sheath dress and dedicated to the value of seeing with the heart, not simply the head.
We and our partners use cookies on this site to improve our service, perform analytics, personalize advertising, measure advertising performance, and remember website preferences.Ok