Thom Browne is a designer who is expected to present the unexpected. The challenge he poses to conventional fashion tropes, and the response that it provokes, has made him one of the most intriguing designers of his generation – not to be second guessed nor underestimated.
That said, ‘A Bug’s Life’ was not on anyone’s bingo card as a reference for his S/S 2027 menswear collection.
The designer watched the 1998 Disney animation on a recent flight from Milan (where his collections are finessed) to New York (where he calls home) and was left enthralled by the story of Flik, an inventive ant who enlists an army of circus bugs to help him defeat the group of grasshoppers who keep stealing their food.
Thom Browne on his Milan Fashion Week show
At his show on Monday afternoon, in the courtyard of the Palazzo Serbelloni in Milan, where 400 seersucker flowerpots had been arranged to create, ‘Thom’s Garden’, it played out in the depiction of bumblebees, leapfrogs, ants, and dragonflies embroidered and appliqued across his signature summer seersucker.
‘I thought it was a charming story to play with and reference for these times that we are living in,’ Browne said with a smile backstage after the show.
The outing was the designer’s much-anticipated return to the Milan menswear schedule for the first time since 2008 and comes as he marks the 25th anniversary of his eponymous label this year. It seemed to have put the designer in both a reflective and inventive mood.
‘For spring, I wanted to focus on why you come to Thom Browne and reinforce the things I’ve been doing for the past twenty years in new ways,’ he told Wallpaper* before the show. ‘You see [it] through really strong tailoring and fabric development but done lighter for summer in poplins for shirting and various weights of tailoring including half and unlined jackets, sheer fabrics and Swiss dot.’
His idea, he continued, was about ‘trying to push people to think differently about tailoring but all rooted in that same original idea behind the grey suit. An evolution but never a change.’
Here, the East-coast American preppy look he is famous for was delivered in soft focus with patchwork and intarsia techniques playing out over the lightest layers of unlined and half-lined outerwear, shirting, and pleated shorts and skirts. Meanwhile, the brand’s signature tri-colour grosgrain tipping was intentionally distressed to represent ‘the seasonal cycles and generations of life these garments will see’.
Realised in Browne’s customary grey and white palette infused with lemon curd, cornflower, and sorbet pink, each outfit in the collection was conceived to be worn as a total look as well as broken down into singular elements, said Browne. ‘There’s a lot in the collection that you can make your own.’
It was a collection that – as ever – offered the wearer respite from rigidity, both in movement and mandate. As he told one reporter after the show, ‘I’ve been putting men in skirts for the last 25 years. I love men seeing collections and clothing differently and not being so strict about the rules of menswear.’
Shortly after the grand finale bridal look – crafted from Swiss dot tailoring, trimmed in his tipping, and wrapped in pearl-embellished tulle – closed the show, Browne himself emerged to take his bow wearing a frog headpiece-cum helmet. In Thom’s garden, anything grows.
