An hour with… Thom Browne

Walking into the Paris showroom of the American fashion designer Thom Browne during fashion week can be an overwhelming experience. A door opens from a quiet landing on to a hive of activity. Dozens of Thom Browne employees, flown in from New York and dressed almost identically, carry suits and shirts and grey pinstripe bomber jackets to and from rails that run around the room, giving journalists tours of Browne’s latest collection and talking among themselves. All staff are wearing the strictly mandated uniform – grey suit, white shirt with the top button undone, a grey wool tie – that was instituted when Browne founded his brand in New York in 2001, and was the only employee. In the 25 years since then, he has rarely been pictured wearing anything else. In the showroom it’s easy, just for a second, to mistake several employees for the man himself.

I’m introduced to the real Browne at the far end of the showroom, where this stately Haussmann building tapers to a point and the windows frame a panorama that spans the end of the Grand Palais, the gilded sculptures of the Pont Alexandre III and, on the other side of the Seine, the French foreign ministry. True to form, he’s wearing a classic sport coat, shrunken cashmere cardigan, a crisp white Oxford shirt, longwing brogues and – despite it being mid-January – Bermuda shorts in a grey twill. It’s Browne’s signature: a playful subversion of the suit, and a conscious provocation. “It bothers people, especially in the wintertime,” he says. “It’s the Irish in me, I guess, but I like to do things that people have a problem with.” And as long as you’re sporting a sturdy pair of socks, he insists, it’s less of a big deal than people make out. “It’s only half your leg!”

Browne is considered to be one of the few designers to have truly reinvented the suit – specifically the grey suit, which has become his consistent creative focus. He has returned, season after season, to remake this metonym for the corporate and the conservative into a site for radical expression. “When you say ‘suit’ to people, they get locked into [thinking about] that boring thing their fathers wore,” he says. “But I find it liberating… it’s made it so easy for me to do so many different things.”

His latest collection is a return to his original vision for the suit, with which he started his brand. “It is a reminder of where it all started: that classic sensibility, the proportion of the jacket and the trouser. That’s what Thom Browne is.”

Browne has shown his collections in Paris, as well as in New York, since 2010, drawn by the city’s more international and experimental fashion scene. “New York has gotten better over the last couple of years,” he says. “But when I first came to Paris, it was because I wanted to be able to show something conceptual and for people to not ask, ‘Well, who’s going to wear that?’”

The brand has, however, always had an “American sensibility”, as Browne puts it, emphasised this season with a runway show in San Francisco that coincided with that great American sporting institution, the Super Bowl. The collection itself included a homage not just to American football but to sport in general: oversized cricket jumpers, blazers in ripstop nylon, Browne’s name and birth year, “65”, emblazoned on the back of the coats . “I can’t wait to get some of the football players in the craziest things,” he says, laughing.

Browne has long been an institution in American fashion. He has won menswear designer of the year at the Council of Fashion Designers of America awards four times (he has also been chairman of that organisation since 2023). He became a household name in the US when Michelle Obama wore a custom Thom Browne coat and dress to her husband’s second inauguration, in 2013. But it is perhaps his collaboration with sportspeople that has both cemented his position in the fashion world and popularised his iconoclastic take on tailoring – in particular his work with the basketball player LeBron James, who has been wearing Thom Browne since 2012, and who in 2018 bought custom suits for his entire team.

“It’s a mutual appreciation,” Browne says. “I’m so inspired by athletes, and I appreciate their appreciation of what I do.” Browne himself was a varsity athlete at the University of Notre Dame, having grown up playing tennis, swimming and running, and has run more than a dozen marathons. Now 60, he still runs eight miles a day – experience that he brought to a recent collaboration with Asics, his first with a sportswear brand. “Making a technical shoe is a totally different thing,” he says, explaining how the project relied on close collaboration between the designers at Asics to arrive at a design that did not compromise the shoe’s technical performance. “I really only want to do projects like this with people who I really want to work with.”

Browne’s brand now operates 120 stores in 40 countries, despite nearly going out of business in 2009. In 2018 the Italian fashion powerhouse Zegna invested $500m in the brand. “Sometimes I don’t really understand fashion,” he says. “The idea that something’s just expensive and beautifully made is sometimes not so interesting. But the idea that you can mix that with something that has a true design with regards to concept – that for me is the most interesting thing in fashion.”

As we rise to leave, we take in the view, the sunlight brilliant on the bridge’s gilded sculptures. “I love that bridge, and I loved how they used it during the Olympics,” he says, referring to its role as the start and finish for the triathlon and marathon swimming events. He shares that when he came to Paris for the Olympics, he was able to go to restaurants and museums when usually, during fashion week, he is too busy. Given how busy he continues to be, it seems unlikely that he will get another chance to take pleasure in the city again anytime soon.

Thom Browne takes over the Corner Shop at Selfridges until 23 March.