New York designer and ApparelMagic client Thom Browne is not afraid of doing things his own way. Case in point? This season he might have put the first garden gnomes—Plural!—on the Paris catwalk.
Browne shrunk his models down to the size of gnomes and set them walking about an astroturf runway among oversize pinwheels and rainbow picket fences.
While the gnomes might be miniature, the clothes themselves didn’t get hit by the shrink ray. The attendees at this trippy garden party wore the Thom Browne classics scaled way, way up. Blazers were knee length. Gingham shorts hit just above the ankle. At foot, his signature wingtips were set atop tall platforms. Preppy critter embroidery went from WASPy and barely noticeable to being twelve-inch-wide embellishments crawling up pants and coats.
Pastel and super-bright, some jackets were covered in topsy-turvy whales, and others in wide, graphic stripes. Mixed and matched with shorts and skirts just as saturated with spring colors, the models looked less Cape Cod and more Yellow Submarine.
While the big statement being made was, well, big, Browne didn’t forget his core customers. After sending the oversized collection down the runway, he sent a second troupe of models out in the same looks but shrunken right back up to his standard proportion. Big or small, these are the suits for men ready to take convention and turn it on its head.
