Thom Browne Brings American Couture to Paris

What does American fashion really look like? It’s an interesting question in the year 2023, but Thom Browne may have answered it—at least on the macro level, with his first couture collection, which debuted on the fall 2023 calendar today in Paris.

The star of the show was none other than the model Alek Wek, who stood on an imaginary train platform on the stage of the Palais Garnier. According to Browne, she stars as a woman who is contemplating her life and how she hasn’t always appreciated what she’s had, as paper spectators in gray suits watched from the opera’s seats facing the audience. The show culminated in the vision of fantasy of what her life actually is—and how she’s happy. Perhaps the underlying thesis was also slightly autobiographical. Here is a designer who was recently named the CFDA chairman and set to celebrate 20 years in the business—which started with a gray suit and spiraled out into a fantasy of collections that have included the likes of high-fashion takes on lobsters, Cinderella, the Little Prince, and no shortage of pieces that have mirrored everything from twisted toys to baseballs.

The day before Browne’s first-ever couture show, the designer’s Paris atelier was humming, with seamstresses making final touches, expert embroiderers sewing on thousands of beads, models, hat makers, and tailors gathering at the altar of the gray Thom Browne suit.

“I feel like I'm representing American fashion,” says Browne. “I’m starting with tailoring, but elevating it to a level that is worthy of being called couture. And the level in regards to fabrications and embroideries is really what you see—but it's been elevated to a higher level.” Think: cape coats covered in Browne’s classic sea elements that look fit for a royal from another universe, jackets covered in waves of navy blue and black beading and sporty little pleated skirts covered in clear beads; their underlying threads revealing subtle shifts of color.

There were men in tailoring suits toting around matching luggage, pigeon-human characters complete with animatronic-like head movements wearing inverted suits, sculpted geometric coats and bulbous gowns–all, for the most part, done up in a whirlwind fantasy of signature Thom Browne hues in grayscale. “Please wear your best gray,” a little card that came with each invitation urged. Little skirts and uniform-like separates dominated, while most models wore broken-doll-like-meets-hospital head wrappings with off-kilter supersized bun hairpieces and sky-high heels, lending a slightly dark and macabre feeling to the show. All in all, it was a quirky and somber show that also had a lot of classic Browne humor.

“It was important for me to show an equal part of men's and equal part women's wear,” Browne said of the co-ed show. “Not only just because the collection is evolving this way, but I think the world is moving that way in that I've even switched some men's looks into women's and women's into men's because it just feels like that's the way people are thinking.”

Even though Browne has been having shows between Paris and New York for years now, the codes of the house of Browne have never been as cemented as much as they have here in this collection. “My codes over the last 20 years that I've really created are in regards to an American sensibility,” he says. “The east coast, preppy iconography, playing with more East Coast references, the idea of preppy university style with stripe fabrics and you know, lobsters and crabs. It’s the idea of that American sensibility done in this really heightened couture French way.”

The highly intricate and detailed work of the collection may not have been visible at first glance on the runway, but up close, it showed proof of many things that were truly spectacular and unique to the Browne universe–like pants that looked like knitwear, but were actually constructed out of light-as-air tulle. “It’s an experience,” says Browne. “Sometimes the quality is the most fashionable thing of what I do. It's a perfect combination of pushing for fabrication and technique and then also making sure that you saw it in an understandable way. Because I wanted the collection to be both conceptual and understandable.”

Cardi B sat front row, making her grand tour through the couture schedule this season. Browne has said that he already does lots of custom work for clients, and in 2022, he dressed Lizzo for her 2022 Met Gala outfit, in a look that took over 22,000 hours of needlework and 900 days to create. “We will have people in the showroom the day after and a couple days after that,” he said. “Making sure that there was some type of reality to the show was important because I wanted people to come and see and entertain the idea of having a piece that will end up in a museum someday,” he says.

As is customary in couture, the show ended with the arrival of the season’s bride. In this case, the coveted role went to the model Grace Elizabeth who closed the presentation in a sheer suit-inspired gown with an epic train and a cheeky train clutch to match.