How Thom Browne created fashion’s most distinctive uniform

There is a certain phenomenon in fashion whereby no matter what theatrics might have appeared on the runway – bouncing crinolines, protrusions of taffeta, an avant-garde silhouette – when it comes to a creative director's final bow, they will usually appear to take it in a sweater and jeans. Few practise what they preach – or, put simply, wear what they design.

There are, of course, exceptions. One is Wallpaper* US400 honoree Thom Browne. For the past 25 years, he has forged a $500m brand in his own meticulous image. Every day, runway show or not, Browne wears a ‘shrunken’ grey flannel wool suit of his own design, nipped in at the body and cropped at the ankle, as if wearing one size too small. It is accessorised with a grey tie, sometimes worn with shorts and a cardigan, and completed with three-stripe socks and lace-up brogues.

It is the uniform he requires of his staff, too. Step inside the brand’s offices on West 35th Street in New York’s Garment District, and you will find an army of near-identically dressed workers in iterations of the singular look, which is distributed to new starters before their first day (the beginner's pack currently includes two grey wool suits, five white Oxford shirts, one grey wool tie and one white pocket square). Some allowances are made when it comes to summer (seersucker is acceptable), and weekends (navy can be worn from Friday to Sunday), though a series of guidelines dictates exactly how (shirts cannot be ironed, top buttons must remain undone, ties must be knotted tightly and tucked into the waistband).

It makes entering a Thom Browne event or runway show a little like performance art, something that the designer himself seems keenly aware of. One memorable presentation, held at the Pitti Uomo menswear fair in Florence back in 2009, saw him construct a surreal scene in which 40 male models – identically dressed in the Thom Browne uniform, with side-slicked hair and wire-rim glasses – populated 40 identical office desks and tapped away at their Olivetti ‘Lettera 32’ typewriters. (The designer has said the 1950s office is a perennial reference point, inspiring the design of his stores, which often feature midcentury furnishings, strip lighting and slatted blinds.) A similar scene took place at Milan Design Week in 2024, when Browne launched a bedding collaboration with Italian textile company Frette; this time, the cast of men and women donned suits and tucked themselves into identical single beds.

If it sounds megalomaniacal, Browne believes the opposite: that a uniform is liberatory, and not simply because it frees up your mind in the morning for other things than deciding what to wear on a given day (though, he argues, this is a definite benefit). ‘I think the person becomes more interesting when you're not so drawn to the clothes,’ he says during our interview at Claridge’s, his preferred address while staying in London. ‘We could all be wearing the same thing, but we look very different.’ As if to prove the point, Browne is flanked by two members of his communications team: though they all wear versions of the same thing, the three men occupy the uniform differently, their personal style still evident in a shock of peroxide blonde hair or an item of jewellery (Browne is the most classic of the trio, his close-cropped grey hair and angular features evoking the groomed 1950s businessman who still serves as his inspiration).

The dichotomy between sartorial belonging and personal expression is a large part of the success of Thom Browne, the designer believes, something proved by its surprisingly wide gamut of devotees. There are film directors (Celine Song, Barry Jenkins and Ryan Coogler all wear Thom Browne in their daily life); actors and musicians (Thom Browne has become a red-carpet mainstay; for the latest Met Gala, he dressed 12 people, making him the most represented designer at the ‘Oscars of Fashion’); and, perhaps most intriguingly for a brand that sways towards the avant-garde, basketballers and football players. In 2018, LeBron James organised custom Thom Browne suits for every member of the Cleveland Cavaliers during the 2018 NBA playoffs; the brand has been a mainstay of the ‘tunnel walk' phenomenon ever since.

‘You didn’t look at them and think: oh, they are all wearing the same thing,’ he says of reimagining the design for the players' towering proportions. ‘Together, they all looked so strong. Sometimes we don't realise how transformative the suit is until the person is wearing it. In a time when everything is not so tailored, not so constructed, you do feel the shift when you put it on. It's powerful.’

Growing up in Pennsylvania, Browne was not a rebellious dresser, nor did he gravitate towards a particular style tribe: in fact, he was more than happy to wear the school uniform of his Catholic school (his family is Irish-Italian in heritage). A competitive swimmer in childhood who would go on to swim with Notre Dame University’s Division I team, Browne had an all-American upbringing, something that filters into his work: Ivy League dress codes run through his collections, from the red, white and blue stripe grosgrain ribbon that he uses as branding in place of more overt logos, to his (oftentimes shrunken) riffs on preppy staples, including Oxford and polo shirts, cardigans, sweaters and striped ties. They are, in his collections, like the suit itself, delivered with a sense of humour, and often a hint of perversity: one memorable menswear show featured a series of Thom Browne jock straps, the sporting garment-turned-fetish item remade in Browne’s three-stripe webbing.

The shrunken suit, however, remains the nexus of his collections, abstracted into a series of fantastical forms, particularly in his womenswear, which has all the drama and savoir-faire of haute couture (he has shown on the couture schedule previously in Paris, the lofty pinnacle of French dressmaking). It has been flattened to its composite pattern pieces and attached to models as one might dress up a paper doll; adorned with dogs, lobsters or whales; worn with matching tutus or billowing skirts; or de- and reconstructed, as with an extraordinary show in 2024 held during Paris haute couture week, whereby the humble ecru muslin used to create tailoring toiles was transformed into a series of gowns and jackets blooming with appliqué flowers or adorned with gold beading (one jacket and skirt took 42 craftspeople 11,000 hours to complete).

Browne speaks of the invention of the shrunken silhouette in mythical fashion, something that arrived to him through intuition over logic (‘my father said that I was a dreamer – I was always in my head trying to create interesting things’). Arriving back on the East Coast from Los Angeles in 1997 (after graduating from Notre Dame, Browne would spend much of his twenties trying to be an actor in Hollywood), Browne initially worked as a salesman at the Giorgio Armani showroom before taking a job at Ralph Lauren offshoot Club Monaco on the design and merchandising team, despite a lack of formal training. In 2001, a line of five own-label suits were created in his one-bedroom apartment, drawing inspiration from vintage styles and strangely contracted in their proportions (he got the initial shape by tumble-drying vintage suits to shrink them; when actor Edward Norton, an early adopter, wore one for a public appearance, Browne remembers commentators quipping that he looked like he was going to middle school).

‘No one liked it,’ he says. ‘They didn’t understand it. It was a time when that look just wasn't in fashion.' But he persevered: by 2003, he had established a ready-to-wear line, and a year later, he staged his first New York Fashion Week show (help came from Miki Higasa, a former Comme des Garçons brand strategist who linked him up with buyers from major department stores). ‘It was exactly what I wanted for myself. I think in that passion, they saw that there was a reality to it.’

In 2005, David Bowie purchased an off-the-rack suit, wearing it for a performance at New York’s Radio City Music Hall days later. Over the next two decades – bolstered by a stint as creative director of Moncler's Gamme Bleu line from 2008-2017 – the Browne look filtered into the mainstream. To wear a Thom Browne suit became a status symbol: recognisable enough for those in-the-know (there is a certain intellectual cachet to his designs that makes him popular within artistic circles), but intriguing enough to pique the interest of the man on the street. In 2018, Italian luxury conglomerate Ermenegildo Zegna Group wanted in on the action: it purchased an 85 per cent share in the brand, leaving Browne with the remaining 15 per cent and full creative control (the group has since upped its share to 90 per cent).

Closer to home, another person Browne credits his success to is his husband, British fashion curator Andrew Bolton (he admits that much of his downtime is now spent with Bolton ‘watching mindless TV’ at home; they have plans to adopt a cat to join their beloved dachshund Hector, who inspired Browne's signature dog-shaped handbag). ‘Andrew is intimidating because of how much he knows about fashion,' says Browne. ‘We talk a lot. We don't always talk specifically about work, because we have to get away from it. But we do sometimes, and he's the only person that would ever make me change something.' Bolton is best known for curating the Costume Institute's annual spring exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the opening of which is heralded each year by the Met Gala, perhaps the fashion industry’s most-watched event.

Over the years, despite having long operated at the fringes, Browne is now firmly part of the establishment: in 2023, he was elected chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), succeeding Tom Ford. Part of that role, alongside representing American fashion on the world stage and overseeing the New York Fashion Week calendar, is shepherding younger designers towards the type of success he has enjoyed. ‘I think the most important thing is that they really want it, that they want to do it more than anything else in the world – it’s not going to happen overnight,’ he says. His own career has been one of perseverance: an unerring belief in what you have created, even when the world around you is yet to catch up with your vision. ‘Actually…,’ he pauses. ‘My advice for young designers is that what I say shouldn't matter. You need to look inside yourself and figure things out on your own.’

This article appears in the August 2026 Issue of Wallpaper*, available now in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today