Two thousand origami birds roosted on Thom Browne’s set, but today’s show started with a pair of red herrings. The two models who emerged first and took perches at a table in the center of the runway where they made more origami wore head-to-toe gray. As it turned out, this was one of Browne’s more colorful collections in recent memory, not just because of the bird details, but also because of the heritage tweeds that were specially designed for the show.
Birds have become a bit of a running motif for Browne. Last year at this time he was thinking about Edgar Allen Poe’s raven. This season he said he’d watched a 60 Minutes segment on birding. “Because of politically what’s going on, I wanted it to be a hopeful kind of reference,” he said. “It morphed into the idea of freedom to be as expressive and as creative as you personally want, and not to listen to other people.” The state of the world has come up remarkably infrequently this week. Fashion can’t fix much of any of it—fashion can’t even fix itself, as the endless comings and goings in Milan and Paris suggest. Designers, Browne observed, “are not being treated so well,” and he seemed to want to express that he stands with them.
When Browne commits he really commits. Most impressive were the color-blocked dresses made from thin bands of bias-cut satin paneled together almost the way a bird’s feathers lie against its body. And then he got even more expressive, rendering the Audubon-ish color-blocking in thick globs of paint that, maybe I was just imagining, sort of looked like bird droppings. I’m only putting these words to paper now because a couple of hours after Browne’s show at a party, it was pointed out by a keen observer that the designer’s interest in our feathered friends goes back further than last year’s Poe reference. In fact, I was told with a big laugh, “bird shit is a Thom Browne house code.” So, we got both hope and humor here, and, everyone seems to agree, the most wearable Thom Browne show in just about ever.
With all that’s going on, that’s actually quite a lot. But what to make of the birdcage on that table, with a miniature version of Browne inside it? “Well, he said, “my mascot in high school was a canary. Only bird that can fly through the eye of a hurricane.”
Editor
Nicole PhelpsCredit
Lead image: Daniele Oberrauch / Gorunway.com
