The proliferation of documentaries, television series and feature movies about fashion brands and designers is a testimony of the powerful omnipresence that fashion has asserted in contemporary culture. It is a blessing and a curse.
Fashion has never been so dangerously popular and ubiquitous in our lives; that is not a surprise, considering that the richest people in the world are members of fashion elites — the Arnault, the Pinault, the Prada, to say a few — and that fashion designers like Marc Jacobs and Kim Kardashian live the well-documented life of princes and princesses, in golden cages and ivory towers. Everybody wants to be a designer, a stylist, a celebrity dressed in fashionable clothes who gets a ticket into the MET Gala.
It was not always like that. For centuries, a career in fashion was not the most popular choice, in particular growing up 50 years ago in the American province, in a traditional middle-class family of lawyers, one of seven kids, like Thom Browne did.
“Thom Browne: The Man Who Tailors Dreams” by director Reiner Holzemer, who previously made films on fashion icons like Martin Margiela, chronicles the making of the designer’s collections in New York and his haute couture debut in Paris. The non-chronological narrative gives the context of Browne’s arrival as an outsider into the fashion world and explains how he matured his unique and uncompromising vision. The movie, beautifully shot in a naturalistic light, captures the spontaneity of the work of the designers and his team. Friends’ and collaborators’ voices and faces are mixed with the predictable Anna Wintour and Tim Blanks appearances, and they point the viewer in the right direction and fill the gaps in the story of Browne’s life and business.
Most impressive is the calm and soothing voice of Browne himself, who with sincerity and humor tries to decode his own life and narrate his career, with a sense of wonder and joy for the magic of his work — the same sense that always comes through in his clothes and in his shows. The bond between Andrew Bolton, the powerful MET Fashion Institute Curator and Browne’s life companion, is also moving for the intensity, the sincerity, the tenderness, the respect for each other, which may surprise even the most skeptic and critical viewer.
On full display throughout the over 100 minutes of the movie, is Browne’s regulated family life, chauffeured in a black shiny Mercedes from his perfectly decorated townhouse in Sutton Place to his surgically designed showrooms, offices and shops. He lives in a timeless capsule, in a parallel world, where, assisted by an army of his clones, he walks in everyday with his dog in tow, wearing his signature gray suit, the proportions of which are altered and twisted: the shrunken jacket, shirt and tie, knit vest and the child-like short pants, worn with high, striped socks and black heavy brogues.
He brings to his creative work on clothes the discipline of an athlete, the swimmer he was in his youth, the dedication to his job similar to that of a humble priest in a religious cult where everybody is invited to participate. He creates uniforms, his gray suit in a thousand variations, because uniforms are, in his words, a social equalizer that can also celebrate everyone’s uniqueness in the sameness of the clothing. Here, in Browne’s perfect universe, we never hear anybody screaming, we do not see any tears, we do not sense any fights.
His fashion shows are perfectly thought, coordinated, reversed and executed in every detail, from head to toe, from the contorted finger nails to the animal headgear and the ball-shaped shoes. There are no model late arrivals, no clothes disappearing, no location cancellations. There are no fashion dramas — the only tense moment in the movie when a model forgets to wear her jacket for the finale of the show, where she drives a skeleton of a pink Cadillac at the Opera Garnier in Paris, doesn’t count.
Who, then, is Browne and why is he so fascinating to the old and the young, all over the world? What makes him so relevant in contemporary fashion? Is it his maniacal persona and his looks? Is it that combination, so rare in fashion as Bolton clearly explains, of a conceptual approach to fashion with a deep craftsmanship knowledge? Is it the control factor, the uncompromising, laser-sharp vision of the designer?
Holzemer’s beautiful and manicured images do not answer the question but lay out all the elements to formulate that answer and to offer an understanding of the man in the gray suit.
Browne is the fashion designer for the times we live in. He really is a multimedia artist who chooses to use fashion as his preferred format for expressing his vision, his emotional life — to tell his story over and over, for dealing with his angels and his demons.
If Browne were born 50 years earlier than his time, probably he would have been an opera composer like Puccini. If he were born only 20 years earlier, he would have been a film director like Coppola. Working in fashion was a deliberate choice because by the end of the ’90s, fashion was, and has been for the last two decades, the best media to express a personal vision. It is the place where immense human and financial resources come together with a global audience, with a deep emotional reach. The place where art and commerce can merge and make the impossible possible — not once, not every few years like in the movie industry, but every season, year after year!
After his happy all-American upbringing in his large family in Allentown, Pennsylvania; after his Notre Dame University varsity days and his identity searching as a scrambling actor in Los Angeles; after his friendship with Libertine’s Johnson Hartig and his first job in New York at Ralph Lauren, he still did not know anything about designing clothes and had no formal or technical education in fashion. He started making suits for himself with an old Long Island Italian tailor and selling them to friends, tailored with no compromises to his vision, traditional and transgressive at the same time.
That suit, with those child-like proportions, changed menswear history. He says, in his words, that ignorance was a blessing because his imagination never had the inhibition of the designers who come out of fashion school; he says that he does not start a collection from a mood board or a system of reference, but from a concept, an idea in his mind, with his eyes closed and his mind open. He has a vision and then an army of tailors, embroiders, assistants, hat makers and prop stylists will help him to bring it to life in exceptional shows that are more theater, operas and performance than fashion runways. The narrative of his shows, so important and clear to him, is, in reality, never literal or consequential; his shows have the quality of dreams where time jumps backward and forward. The clothes are always props, the costumes for expressing what is in his head.
Then, Browne’s omnipresent shrunken suit with all its variations for men and women alike, are what clouds are for Magritte and his flannel gray is what a certain kind of blue in for William Klein. A signature, a code, a beginning and an end.
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