Style Editorial : Thom Browne is for the grown-up hipsters
On April 29th, the world discovered Sarah Burton because she designed the wedding dress of the most viewed and reviewed wedding the world has known. Today, I’d like the world to discover the 2006 award-winning Thom Browne (for the best menswear designer, not for his past experiences as an actor). He has built a quite unique suit silhouette that is easily recognizable. And this is the miracle I’m stressing out : while beeing a very serious high-quality tailoring label, Thom Browne softens the lines with a brilliant sense of humour. Check the rest of this editorial for more about his modernist aesthetic !
Browne’s ultra-narrow, way-too-short approach to fashion brings a new line to counterculture style. Because this is what it is : TB acts in an assumed provocative way, playing with the sartorial codes, to make the suits cool again in the decade that crowned Abercrombie and the casual-friday-everyday.
Thom Browne is changing the American male style aesthetic one pair of short pants at a time. His ultra-narrow suits have infiltrated the fashionable film world and now Wall-Street.
You guessed it already : the key is to make your pieces slim and revealing around the wrist and ankle area. You should be barefoot or cheat with undectable low socks. The look is dapper, but twisted,
clever but fun. Conventional but unconventional.
Last june, Browne exposed to the world in Paris (at the French Communist Party’s old Oscar Niemeyer-designed headquarters) how to dress like a free man in the 21st century : shark-patterned suits, and
crest-emblazoned sports jackets in gabardine, seersucker, and cotton madras, most worn with shorts that hit just above the knee, as they should always do. Browne doesn’t deny his deeply rooted classic
american influences and plays with saddle shoes, repp ties, aviator sunglasses, and of course, his meaningful beloved signature, red, white, and blue detailings.
All things short, clothes for the grown-up hipsters !
Rules of style from Thom Browne (source details.com)
1.
I don’t understand why everybody thinks that dressing casually is so much more comfortable. I’m as comfortable in a suit as I am in anything else.
2.
Good champagne—good, not expensive—has been my cocktail of choice for as long as I can remember. I like them all—Bollinger, Taittinger, and others. I also collect champagne coupes; I have more than 10. They’re one of the few things that I collect.
3.
Chariots of Fire, Death in Venice, North by Northwest, and The Thomas Crown Affair are some of my favorite films—and they’re all particularly inspiring for menswear. I watch movies all the time but I don’t like to go to the theater. It’s just too much.
4.
Guys shouldn’t spend a lot of money on a haircut. I go to Chelsea Barbers in New York, where I pay about $30. The price went up, but I’m very loyal to the woman there.
5.
It’s sad that the cell phone is replacing the watch as a time-telling device. I wear a vintage watch that’s really skinny.
6.
When it comes to shoes, you don’t really need more than a few pairs of wing tips or oxfords. They’re classics. And I wear only black shoes in the city. Brown ones are for the country.
7.
Men don’t know enough about being courteous toward women. You should get into a cab before a woman so she doesn’t have to slide across the seat. And you should always go first into a revolving door so she doesn’t have to push—unless it’s moving, then let her go first.
8.
Seersucker and khaki suits are the key to looking put-together in the summer. I also wear shorts year-round. And I would never say never, but I don’t wear sandals. With shorts, it’s wing tips and tennis socks.
9.
I like menswear from the late fifties and early sixties. It’s the uniformity and the lack of choice from that era that I respond to. It’s also the last time that there was such a distinct American style. Now it’s all jumbled up and homogenized.
10.
I love white linen sheets, but they need to be ironed, so that limits my use of them. Otherwise, I like really good, starched white cotton sheets. They have to be white.
