Pomp and Precision

It was the year 1988. A clean-cut 22-year-old named Tom Browne was standing at the edge of an Olympic-size pool in his black Speedo, contemplating a dive into the frigid water. The location was the University of Notre Dame, where Browne’s spot on the Fighting Irish swimming distance freestyle was the result of years of work starting at age 8 in Allentown, Pennsylvania—years of 4 a.m. wakeup calls, years of freezing temperatures enveloping his body, years of shrill starter-whistles echoing off cavernous roofs, years of driving hours to competitions, years of striving to become all-American. Suddenly, he was competing in the very last meet of his college career. It was the end.

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But Browne could only feel one thing. “I was so burnt out,” he remembers. “I literally remember thinking, I can’t believe I never have to dive into a pool ever again.”

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Yet, decades after graduating—after creating designs for David Bowie and Doechii, working with brands from Moncler to Samsung, showing couture collections in Paris, and creating a self-named company valued at over $500 million when Zegna acquired 85 percent of it in 2018—the man now known as Thom Browne says it’s the rhythm and routines of swimming that help to sustain him.

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“It’s just who I am,” says the designer, who at 59 has closely cropped hair that is mostly peppered with grey but otherwise looks pretty similar to his swim team days. “I am very controlled, and I am very boring, and I am very rigorous.”

He is sitting at a conference table in his office in New York’s Garment District, where his company now occupies several floors of a nondescript building. Inside, after walking down a narrow, imposing marble hallway, it’s like opening the doors to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory if, instead of sugar, all the fantastical creations were made of medium-grey Super 120s wool twill. Rooms are painted searingly white, matching the white lab coats sometimes worn by employees over their Thom Browne outfits—part of a company-wide dress code during fashion week and events like the Met Gala.

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As for the designer, he is wearing his habitual ensemble, a distinctive style that has become synonymous with his brand: two grey cardigans layered (one tightly buttoned over a crisp white shirt and dark tie), tailored shorts in grey suiting cloth, high socks, and neatly laced brogues, each item adorned with a red, white, and blue grosgrain ribbon. The office is quiet, even though it’s merely two weeks before his next fashion show, which, like the others before it, will be a theatrically staged meditation on dressing, this time featuring 45 different English tweeds and 2,000 origami birds set to crescendo into a glitteringly embroidered, couture-worthy ball gown.

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Browne—who now lives in Manhattan’s genteel Sutton Place with his husband, Andrew Bolton, the head curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute, and their 9-year-old wire-haired dachshund, Hector—sticks with the same morning routine every day: the gym and a coffee from Sant Ambroeus. Today, he is serenely calm now that he has banished an ersatz silver tray from the table, where it held small bottles of water. “Why?” he asks as he picks it up, puzzled at the small intruder into his carefully curated universe. Handbag iterations of Hector, which have become a sought-after status item from the brand, look on silently from the shelves.

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“I would like people to see more than just the overwhelming fantasy that I’m putting in front of you, because there are more layers.”

— Thom Browne

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From the start, Browne knew exactly what he wanted. “I wanted it to be something that was so much more than fashion,” he says. “I wanted to create an image that really meant something in this world, so that when people thought of Thom Browne, they had an idea—an image in their head,” he adds, hearkening to the distinctive, slightly shocking silhouette of suits with shrunken jackets and cropped pants that he first offered in 2003 by appointment from a tiny West Village shop. He launched the brand, which he funded by requesting half of the payment for each suit up-front from clients, after working for Ralph Lauren and Giorgio Armani both in sales and design. The cut caused immediate consternation simply by baring men’s ankles. “I was trying to be provocative in a very quiet way that really drove people crazy,” he remembers. “And it’s a little bit of my personality of just, without screaming, doing something that makes people even more uneasy.”

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But it was never about sales. “The ambition was about the making, really, rather than the growing,” he says of the business. “I wasn’t like young designers today that want to be superstars and rich immediately. I didn’t think past the couple things that I made for myself so that I didn’t overthink it.”

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Browne says he doesn’t look to what other designers do, nor does he seek advice from stylists or stockists, which is part of why the Thom Browne world can feel like a delightful, hermetically sealed cabinet of curiosities. Instead, he competes with himself, always striving to outdo the last show. “I knock myself off all the time,” the designer says. Certain recognizable tropes reappear in his work, much the way a classical composer might revisit a beloved theme. Browne thinks to himself, That’s a good idea that needs to be better.

His semiannual shows draw a cultish group of Thom Browne-clad fans as much for the imaginative stagecraft as the complex couture. Attendees have witnessed ice-skating models in a Chelsea art gallery, a fully catered grand banquet on a Parisian runway, a nightclub, an Amish barn-raising, all manner of ghostly forests, preppy beach clubs, every type of sporting event, and even rows and rows of vaguely menacing, fascistic teddy bears. One recent couture collection was a euphoric riff on the most basic of dressmaking fabrics: beige muslin, which in Browne’s hands may as well have been silk taffeta, with elaborate jacket piled on jacket, idea piled on more, until it seemed incredible that the models made it down the runway. Last year, a recording of actress Carrie Coon crooning Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 poem The Raven played instead of a show soundtrack.

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Still, clothes reign supreme for Browne. “I would like people to see more than just the overwhelming fantasy that I’m putting in front of you, because there are more layers,” says the designer, who emphatically rejects overintellectualization of his collections. “I’m the worst at speaking about my work... I don’t always think it’s as challenging as people think.”

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Instead, he sees a different gauntlet: “The challenge is, I would rather design something and have people come to the designs, as opposed to designing for people right where they are.”