Notes on Camping (in the Snow)—From Thom Browne
We’ve shaken the Vogue Runway archive like a snow globe. When the glistening flakes settled, the very best winter wonderland shows were revealed. We’re sharing them, one by one, over eight days. For the finale: Thom Browne’s Fall 2018 menswear collection, presented at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts on January 20, 2018, in Paris.
Two snow angels presided over the campout at Thom Browne’s Fall 2018 menswear show. In their long white skirts and striped balaclavas, Boy Scouts they were not. Instead, let’s call them leaders of a pack of fashion-forward gents clearly in touch with their feminine side. (The models wore ribbon-tied pigtails that framed their rosy cheeks; muffs and lace also made an appearance.) Down the center of the snow-filled set punctuated with slender birch trees stood a single line of cots that suggested everything was unfolding in a sort of dream state. From the start it was clear that Browne’s narrative was a fictive one.
Winter Wonderland
This was a multilayered show on many levels. The stated inspiration was Tom Brown’s School Days, a Victorian novel about public school boys. But was there a visual echo of Brideshead Revisited’s Sebastian Flyte in the teddy bear one union-suited model carried? And the strictly aligned cots, could they also nod to an adorable Parisienne named Madeline who, with her friends, lived and bunked “in two straight lines”? Adding yet another, surreal layer to the set was that the unrolled sleeping bags had appliqués of a gray suit, Browne’s signature and the starting point of all his collections.
A longtime collaborator of Moncler, Browne lost no speed after the company changed strategy and closed its Gamme Rouge and Bleu lines; instead he took winter sports tropes to a higher elevation with this show. “I think a lot of people see what I do as just tailoring, but there is so much sportswear within the collection, as well, and that’s been probably the most recent development,” the designer told Vogue Runway’s Luke Leitch. His theme and timing were as impeccable as his haberdashery skills: Browne showed just in advance of the Olympic Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. The snow-geared active pieces were certainly on trend, but the most innovative items were designed not so much for snow but as protection against it. Suits were cut from blankets, and one down-filled garment featured a lace that depicted Browne’s dog, Hector.
