Queerguru’s Robert Malcolm reviews “Thom Browne: The Man Who Tailored Dreams” ( and made men wear shorts suits)

With his post-punk preppy aesthetic, and his admiration for classical tailoring, Thom Browne is the love child of Ralph Lauren and Alexander McQueen.

Following his late-life arrival at the fashion carnival he has become America’s darling, dressing Michele Obama and numerous A list celebrities, whilst filling the gap left by the fading fashion stars of the eighties and nineties. The movie is peppered with glowing interviews with the likes of Janet Jackson,Diane Keaton and Whoopi Goldberg. 

Thom Browne is a phlegmatic, quiet, and likable man. He is no drama queen and he doesn’t talk much about his design process, so this documentary is low on action and intellectual content. Anna Wintour is convinced that he goes his own way and is 100% not influenced by other designers, but I see a lot of Alexander McQueen in what he does. Unlike McQueen, however, his talent is matched by a solid grounding in business and his approach to his work is quirkily pragmatic.
Growing up in a middle class Pennsylvanian, Italian-Irish Catholic family, he attended school at Notre Dame, where he earned his preppy sporting credentials and a degree in economics.

After trying his hand at acting in LA he returned to New York and started working as a salesman for Giorgio Armani and Ralph Lauren. He is not a tailor himself, but in 2001, at the age of 46, his interest in tailoring led him to open his first West Village store selling made to measure mens suits.  

Browne is always seen wearing his signature shrunken grey flannel suit with shorts, the look which made him famous. This was cute when he was younger, but now that he is approaching sixty it seems less than appropriate.It is also slightly disturbing that his dedicated staff are all happy to wear versions of this uniform. Breaking the rules has its own rules, and we learn from an employee that this includes never buttoning the top button of a shirt or the buttons of a button down collar.

Browne has been influential in the promotion of gender fluid fashion. In 2018 in a show called Why Not? he confidently sent male models down the runway in grey kilts and skirts, with suit jackets. It worked well and they looked great. His early womenswear collections although less successful, also borrowed heavily from men’s tailoring. Once again he was subverting the suit and challenging societal norms.

Later that year he sold 85% of his business to the Italian luxury brand Zegna for 500 million dollars and in 2019 he and his partner bought a 7000 sq ft Sutton Place property which they began to renovate. As of 2020 90% of Browne’s business is owned by Zegna but he still retains creative control. 

Browne, like McQueen before him, is known for his theatrical presentations, more like performance art than runway shows. Often these include uniforms, repetition and multiples, whether an army of models in identical suits at work in an office or an audience of indistinguishable teddy bears occupying half the seats at a show. We can’t tell if he likes conformity or is critical of it. Possibly both.

In the close knit fashion world there is a symbiotic relationship between the industry and the beautiful, rich and famous. Celebrities help to sell clothes. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than at the Met Gala. It can’t have hindered Thom Browne’s career that his life partner, Andrew Bolton is the curator of the Anna Wintour Costume Collection at the museum. Browne’s spectacular red dress for Cardi B (hilarious in her interview) at the 2019 Gala heralded his arrival as an important women’s wear designer and paved the way to his first haute couture show in Paris in 2023. 

The documentary follows his preparations for this lavish presentation at the Palais Garnier. In typical Thom Browne manner, the event is well organised and everything runs to plan until MJ Rodriguez forgets to wear her jacket, a minor crisis which is soon forgotten. This is the pinnacle of the film’s dramatic arc. 

It appears that many of his shows depend on attention grabbing gimmicks and very few of the outfits are wearable. In the collection documented, boys faces were made up like circus clowns and they were dressed in deconstructed red white and blue American inspired costumes, often revealing Y-front underwear or jockstraps, teetering on high platform shoes. Grey suits were inset with giant coloured polka dots and cowboys in sequinned chaps revealed erect codpieces. 

For American audiences this may seem radical, challenging or entertaining, but European designers have been courting outrage for well over twenty years, since before Thom Browne was in business.

In his favour, his creative narrative appears to revolve around the concept of childhood rather than sex. The way he presents himself as an overgrown schoolboy, and his runway fantasies, including one menswear show entitled The Little Prince, encourage us to tap into the imagination we had as children. The dreams of the film’s title are not wet ones. 

In 2007 Browne was taken to court by Adidas, who claimed that his three striped motif was similar to their own brand. Browne conceded by adding a stripe, but in 2021 Adidas tried to sue Browne again when the stripes appeared at an angle on footwear and sportswear. Fortunately for Browne, Adidas lost their case in 2023.   

Bolton and Browne now live comfortably in their tastefully restored 17 room townhouse. Both are workaholics, who keep to strict regimes, but make enough time to enjoy one another’s company. Together, they value a sense of order and in their elegant Georgian mansion, nothing is out of place. 

Recently elected as Chair of the Council of Fashion Designers in America, the position previously held by Tom Ford, Thom Browne is at the height of his career. 

Over the last few years fashion has become a popular documentary subject, but unfortunately Reiner Holzemer’s accomplished  but uncritical and formulaic film comes across as just another designer approved vehicle to sell fashion as art, when first and foremost, fashion is a money making enterprise. There is a much more interesting film about Thom Browne, still to be made.  

Thom Browne: The Man Who Tailored Dreams is directed by Reiner Holzemer  who also helmed Martin Margiela: In His Own Words and Dries

 

 

Robert Malcolm is an Interior Designer who relocated from London to his home town of Edinburgh in 2019. Under the pen name of Bobby Burns he had his first novel, a gay erotic thriller called Bone Island published by Homofactus Press in 2011.