Thom Browne's Schooldays

Thom Browne's mission is one of education. Men, he feels, are incapable of moving beyond the closet of the eternal boy. Said boy wears jeans around his lower hips and exposes his boxers; his shirt of choice is made by Hanes. Even when the boy takes on one of life's greater responsibilities--a job--he remains a sartorial Peter Pan.

The American workplace has changed. It is now a bigger battleground than ever, thanks to a spurious "benefit" known as Casual Friday. Men were unable to interpret Casual Friday to their advantage and floundered while attempting to decode it. If one wore a suit on Casual Friday, one would not be seen as atta-boy, one of the gang. It wouldn't do to wear the clothes one wore while washing the car, either. This would be a mark of disrespect and worse, a sign that the wearer either wasn't serious about his career or was a Class-A idiot.

Neither outcome boded well for the white-collar male.

The Casual Friday dress code generally held that collared polo shirts and khaki trousers were acceptable workplace attire. But polo shirts and khaki trousers were in many ways more of a symbolic stranglehold than the suit. Suits at least varied in cut and men have since time immemorial been fairly expressive with ties. Browne felt that business dress demanded rehabilitation, and when he accomplished rehabilitation the previous mode of dress would become obsolete. The idea was not a new one. Adapting dress to serve the needs of the wearer and to improve his appearance dates back to the Upper Paleolithic period. Browne's premise was simple and sensible. More importantly, it solved a critical social problem.

With no formal training, Browne took on the gargantuan task of overhauling menswear. Men's professional clothing had devolved into uselessness. He rapped some knuckles in his debut collection: Ankles and wrists must be exposed. This was the first indication that Browne's signature look would consistently refer back to the Catholic schoolboy and the schoolboy's short, emasculating trousers.

Short pants have always been a linguistic metaphor. The expression "short pants" refers to the act of being one-upped, generally with no small amount of embarassment. Men do not take kindly to being short-pantsed, either on military or on workplace battlefields. Someone who has been short-pantsed or someone who is wearing them will probably spend the next year trying to live it down.

Thom Browne envisioned the working man as needing a rigorous set of rules, and then he formulated those rules using his peculiar Catholic logic. Men were not dressing organically. A Thom Browne suit would do away with the question of current style or fit: His suits would be straitjacket-tight. He wouldn't be concerned with either art or beauty, because art and beauty have a tendency to get in the way. Once he had adapted men's business dress to his rules, he would take on every other decorative aspect of a man's life. In a 2006 interview, he stated that he intended to author entire lifestyles.

And so Thom Browne fought the illogicality of men's dress and replaced it with aberration.

Aberration is a subjective--and probably pejorative--term that arises from critical response to the ongoing evolution of Thom Browne, designer. His suits sell well in Japan, home to a generation of fantastically erratic dressers. In America, the designs have at the very least created startled (and often repulsed) buzz.

Browne's Fall 2008 collection may have boosted that buzz to a lunatic's cry. In a fine punk moment, Browne channeled his inner Johnny Rotten with a show he set in an asylum circus. History may be on the verge of repeating itself. Rotten famously jeered "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" at his Winterland audience, right before he walked off the stage and quit the band that made him famous. What he meant was that the jig (or gig) was up. The joke, he sneered, was on you.

You, of course, were a moron for buying a ticket.

So preposterous was Browne's fall collection that it is hard to see it for anything other than a middle finger to both the fashion industry and to that part of society that hasn't reached a point in its evolution where it can appreciate and applaud Browne's stylistic kink. Or it could have been an onanistic display of his own sexual desires, in which case we're in trouble. His original logic in bringing the working man closer to his business culture failed so badly in this instance that the exact opposite occurred.

In order to appreciate Browne, the customer needs to consider overall message. Men's clothes do not fit properly and men do not often update or adapt well. Men excel at many things, but sartorial evolution isn't one of them. Browne makes a good case for a slimmer suit; it enhances and smartens the body the way the best women's designs do.

That, however, is the only solid point he made. Structurally, he was as focused as he has ever been. The trouble is that this is now an older focus, and one that Browne chose to update and reinforce through self-indulgent absurdity. Parading around the circus ring were malchik altar boys, a feathered Yeti, Riff Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and a Siamese-twin Tweedledee. Many wore knitted dunce caps; one wore a baby's bonnet. A few wore cloaks of acolyte fetish.

Underlying it all was a sense of aggrieved nose-thumbing. The message, maybe: Men are nothing but children who run amok in the corporate world and probably keep odd collections of beetles at home. Corporal punishment would solve the problem, but until such time as we revert to the rod we understand that men are deviant schoolboys with a madman's sense of style.

At least that's what it looked like from the sidelines.

Images: MEN.STYLE.COM