A Bit Of Fashion Magic: Thom Browne On The Making Of His Fall 2020 Collection

It’s early February, a time before social distancing and coronavirus panic in the United States. In New York, it’s raining and sirens are blaring, but we are in the considered calm of Thom Browne’s office in the Garment District. Browne is demonstrating his daily switch-a-roo from a custom sport wool blazer, now pristinely hung on the back of his chair, to a well-loved cashmere cardigan that he wears while sketching at his mid-century desk. Browne is framed between monolithic paintings of squares, triangles, and squiggly lines as he picks up a marker. My colleagues and I crane our necks while trying to stay out of the director’s frame. We’ve been promised that the designer will reveal how he turns these graphic sketches into living, breathing garments.

At first glance, it might seem impossible that one of Browne’s sketches, so square, finite, and inflexible, would become clothing. “I sketch this way because I can’t actually illustrate—at all,” the designer laughs, slowly walking us through his key shapes and their meanings. A triangle would become a pleated skirt, a staple of the Browne oeuvre. A square? That’s a shorter jacket, while a rectangle would be a piece of outerwear.

To the outsider, the Thom Browne universe can look cold, uncomfortable even. Why would you strap your body into tight little shorts, strap your mind into such a specific way of working? But within the gray walls of Browne’s offices in New York and Paris, there is much warmth, much play, and lots of room to push boundaries.

Vogue had the pleasure of following the designer as he built his fall 2020 collection. It uses Noah Ark’s as a jumping-off point for blurring gender lines—this would be the first unisex show of his career—and blurring the possibilities of Browne’s beloved gray wool suit. Instead of the traditional skirts (triangles, remember?) and shorty-shorts (presumably a tiny square), Browne and his design team built tops, skirts, and overcoats using pre-existing garments without cutting away any of the slack. In our video, you can see a muslin test of a skirt created from all the elements that would traditionally comprise the top half of a TB suit: The blazer, the cardigan, the shirt, and the tie are collaged together around the body, any errant sleeves left to trail or be tucked via a clever origami into the final garment.

The hero look, or should we say looks, in this documentary are the first ones out on the runway. Worn by a male and female model, the ensembles transpose Browne tropes into a new mode of fashion for the future: skirts as tops, cardigans as scarves, and crisp white shirts as trains on navy overcoats. It’s all the Browne signatures, topsy-turvied until they come out new, and paired with wonderfully silly giraffe-shaped bags to boot. Watch how Browne and his team make their joyous fashion magic happen in our exclusive video.