Dressing notable people in twisted-prep designs is a core tenet of the Thom Browne brand. You’ll usually find a cadre of famous men attending his fashion shows wearing things they perhaps normally wouldn’t, like actor Lee Pace in a pair of peach-pink dress pants that have been freshly shorn into thigh-hugging shorts, Milwaukee Bucks center Serge Ibaka in a gray tweed shift dress and a little Navy sailor hat, actor Will Poulter in khaki suspenders and a big ol’ briefcase, or musician Jaden Smith in a seersucker jacket bulked up with bulbous, football-pad-shaped shoulders, all of whom showed up to Browne’s menswear presentation in Paris on Sunday.
“The most important thing is that they’re true individuals,” Browne once told GQ of his eccentric taste in celebrity ambassadors, who have previously included the likes of Lebron James, Pete Davidson, Travis Barker, and Lil Uzi Vert. “They’re really true to themselves, and they do something. We live in a world where some people are famous for not doing very much, which is not interesting to me at all. I like people to put the time in and be serious about what they do, and not care about what anybody else thinks.” Browne’s disruptive menswear is well-suited for disruptive dudes.
The menswear Browne presented this weekend was irreverent as ever: there were no heels on parade on the runway like last season (only cheeky tweed loafers, with the exception of one very notable pair of denim-tweed cowboy boots, which accompanied a matching codpiece), or on the famous men who sat front row. A few key looks played on masc-Americana tropes of the surfer, the sailor, the tennis player, and the cowboy, a group that very well could have enlisted Smith’s quarterback or Poulter’s businessman. (Wearing even a modest Thom Browne skirt, David Harbour told GQ last year, can still feel a bit theatrical for real life, whereas “for a fashion shoot, it’s something like a fantasy space, and you’re creating a character and playing a role and that’s fun to test it out.”) But the unifying garment of this particular show was the red, white, and blue jockstraps haloing the models’ waistbands—yet another trend that, as Vogue Runway writer José Criales-Unzueta recently wondered, may or may not make it to the mainstream. Guess we’ll have to wait another season or two to see.
