Image via Getty/Taylor Hill
“White stripes on the arm of my Thom Browne suit.” Rappers like Lil Uzi Vert have been fans of Thom Browne long before he busted out a full look alongside Erykah Badu at the Met Gala in 2021. The revered New York City-based fashion designer is not a new name, to say the least. Thom Browne recently celebrated 20 years in business. And within that timespan, he has grown to become one of the most influential American fashion designers still working today. But why has everyone from Gucci Mane to Michelle Obama been attracted to his clothes? It’s because Thom Browne, like other great American fashion designers such as Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, has crafted a design language that is uniquely his own.
Although Browne has been nominated eight times for the menswear designer of the year award by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, he’s not a formally trained fashion designer. Born in 1965 in the Rust Belt town Allentown, Pennsylvania, he grew up playing sports and going to school, raised by a family filled with doctors, businessmen, and lawyers.
“I never thought about [fashion],” he toldBusiness of Fashion. “You almost didn’t even know it existed. You’d go to stores and you didn’t even think of how the clothing was designed and who made it. It was more of a commodity, in a way.”
But Browne grew up with a wardrobe that influenced the aesthetic he’s known for today. Garments like gray flannel slacks or jackets, navy blazers and khaki trousers. In interviews, he’s constantly brought up being inspired by how his father wore a suit every day. “I think a lot of times you see a true American sensibility, and sometimes an East Coast sensibility, in the collection,” Browne told Business of Fashion. “That was very much what we grew up wearing, very classic American sportswear and clothing.”
A graduate of Notre Dame’s business program and a college competitive swimmer, Browne was originally an actor before entering the world of fashion. After he graduated from Notre Dame in 1988, he briefly worked as a business consultant before moving to Hollywood to pursue an acting career. His first name is actually spelled “Tom,” but was changed to “Thom” after he became a member of the Screen Actors Guild because the name “Tom Browne” was accounted for. But Hollywood was also where Thom Browne got his start making clothing. In several interviews, he reminisces on cutting up vintage Brooks Brothers suits and changing the silhouettes with his roommate at the time Johnson Hartig—the founder of the menswear label Libertine—while working as an assistant on film shoots during the day. After Browne watched Hartig wash vintage suits and throw them in the dryer, Browne began experimenting with the shrunken tailoring that he’s known for today.
“I got the bug to do it, but I knew I wanted to actually make them, from scratch,” Browne told GQ. The actor turned designer was inspired by the look of The Organization Man—the late 1950s middle-class office employee. “If you look at JFK, the suits he used to wear, I always thought the jacket was shorter. In actuality, it wasn’t so short. The trousers weren’t as slim as they seemed. In my head, it was different.” During a moment when men in ‘90s Los Angeles were dressing like rockstars, Browne realized that classic suiting could serve a radical departure from the norms of casual modern dress codes. With a vision for a brand developing, he moved to New York City in 1998 to really dip his toes into the fashion industry. He started as a receptionist before landing a wholesale job at Armani. “I really just needed a job and it just happened to be in fashion,” he told Business of Fashion when reflecting on his time at Armani. “It didn’t really influence how I approached design, but it did teach me how to actually build a business.” After Browne met Ralph Lauren through his boyfriend at the time, Charles Fagan—an executive VP at Polo—he was hired by Lauren to design trousers, cardigans, and oxford shirts for Club Monaco.
“I designed everything that we couldn’t give away,” Browne told WWD. “I wanted to bring tailored clothing into the world of Club Monaco, which was really the precursor to my first collection. And it was not successful.”
But through Club Monaco, Browne met the lauded Queens-based tailor Rocco Ciccarelli, who served as an instrumental mentor when Thom Browne launched his eponymous label in 2001. “I pretty much learned everything through my tailor Rocco,” Browne told Business of Fashion. “I always knew that tailoring was going to be something that, if I was going to be in fashion, [my collection] was going to center around. The most important thing for me is to make interesting clothes that are really well-made. That will always be fashionable.”
In collaboration with Ciccarelli, Browne created his first collection of five gray suits in 2001, which he presented in his Upper East Side, Manhattan apartment-turned-showroom-alteir. He garnered his first customers by just walking around New York City in the suits he made. Browne saw that in a world where business casual dress codes were the norm, he could fill in a gap and redefine tailoring for a younger generation. Despite how untraditional his silhouettes were, Browne stuck to his guns because he knew his suits had to be different from tailoring of the past.
“Back then, all tailored clothing was very businesslike, very much like what young guys’ fathers were wearing—and they didn’t want to be like their fathers,” he told Business of Fashion. “I wanted to reintroduce tailored clothing to them so they felt they could dress in it and feel as comfortable and as young as they did in jeans and T-shirts.”
Browne then went on to open his first made-to-measure storefront in 2003 and then presented for the first time at New York Fashion Week in 2004. Two years later, he won his first CFDA award for menswear designer of the year. From handwriting the labels on his clothes to being stocked in department stores like Bergdorf Goodman and trendy boutiques like Colette, Browne soon became the New York City fashion designer of the moment. The major labels started calling. In 2007, Browne signed a deal with Brooks Brothers to design a collaborative line dubbed “Black Fleece,” a partnership which lasted for eight years. In 2009, the luxury skiwear brand Moncler tapped Browne to design their Gamme Bleu line of outerwear, a collaboration which lasted for eight years as well. Supreme was even compelled enough to reach out to Thom Browne for a collaboration in 2010, which consisted of a run of chambray oxford shirts with Thom Browne’s iconic underline labeling.
But what makes Thom Browne a designer so revered by both streetwear brands like Supreme and luxury brands like Moncler is the world he has built as a designer. What lies at the core of that is Thom Browne’s unique “uniform” aesthetic, which is exemplified by his revered Fall 2009 menswear presentation at Pitti Uomo. Browne’s first show in Europe featured 40 models eerily clacking on typewriters, eating sandwiches out of briefcases, and putting on jackets in unison inside a space designed to look like an office from the Mad Men-era. Each model wore the brand’s most iconic motifs. A shrunken gray suit, a cardigan with four stripes on the left sleeve, heavy wing-tip shoes, and a camel overcoat.
Browne’s garments have referenced the uniforms of businessmen, school children and even military officers. But with every collection, Browne takes these core uniforms and reimagines them. Take his Fall 2012 menswear collection for instance, which was centered on a “jocks versus punks” theme. The “punks” wore pieces with some of Browne’s skinniest tailoring that were embellished with safety pins, studs, and more. Meanwhile, the “jocks” wore oversized suits that made them look cartoonishly muscular. But at the end of the day, they are both wearing looks that were just different interpretations of the same uniform. This encapsulates Browne’s approach as a designer who has mastered taking just one design, or uniform rather, and making hundreds of unique iterations of it. For example, his recent Fall 2021 collection was centered on traditional black-tie clothing with looks that are anything but conventional. The collection included a ball skirt constructed out of layered puffers that took more than 100 pattern pieces to make, pleated trench coats, shrunken down jackets layered over wool piqué, and more. But despite how avant garde the looks in this collection were, it was still rooted in a uniform that is familiar to almost anyone. Even those who aren’t viscerally aware of the high fashion space Thom Browne occupies as a designer today.
Granted, Thom Browne hasn’t captured the same cultural cachet as a streetwear brand like Supreme, his garments have become a part of the mainstream zeitgeist thanks to many celebrity co-signs and front-facing collaborations. He’s released two collaborations with Samsung centered on the Galaxy Z Flip and Galaxy Z Fold, two smartphones Browne admired for how they folded shut like cellphones of the past. Yes, those Thom Browne Samsung phones even came with four-stripes branding and a keyboard that made vintage typewriter sounds as you texted. Browne’s shrunken down suits have even permeated the world of sports. In 2018, Browne dressed LeBron James and the entire Cleveland Cavaliers team in his suits for the 2018 NBA playoff away games. Within that same year, Browne also signed a three-year deal with the Spanish soccer club FC Barcelona to become the team’s official provider of off-field tailored fits and formalwear uniforms until the 2021-2022 season. From Odell Beckham Jr. to Cardi B, Browne has strategically styled celebs from all walks of life to push his unique vision for tailoring. At the Met Gala, for example, he dressed celebrities ranging from Erykah Badu, Lil Uzi Vert, and comedian Pete Davidson to actresses like Sharon Stone and Amandla Stenberg.
Despite his success running a profitable label that has brought in over $200 million in annual revenue, Browne has never been approached to design for a major luxury house and is still solely focused on his eponymous label today. In 2018, the Ermenegildo Zegna Group acquired 85 percent of the Thom Browne business at a $500 million valuation, leaving Browne as the only other shareholder with 15 percent ownership over his business. But since then, it’s clear that Browne’s hyper-creative vision has never been compromised. His runway shows continue to be interpreted as some of fashion’s great art installations. And his most recent presentation at New York Fashion Week this year was a long awaited homecoming to where it all started.
While celebrities like Doja Cat and Lil Uzi Vert will have access to some of his most eccentric looks, his more commercialized garments still remain true to his original ethos. Like other great American fashion designers, there’s something timeless about Thom Browne’s aesthetic that attracts the masses. But unlike others, Browne is still restlessly adventurous and is constantly looking to move the needle for American fashion today while remaining boldly true to himself.