Thom Browne and his partner Andrew Bolton recently acquired an 18th-century land pile called Teviotdale in the Upper Hudson Valley. Although Teviotdale appeared in an Architectural Digest spread in 1980, it can also be viewed in this collection: to enjoy its Palladian proportions, simply look at the bag in look 13, or focus on the facade by looking at the vest in look 18 to watch. Teviotdale, like Hector before it, seems set to become a totemic feature of Browne’s carefully tailored American fashion landscape.
The house is both an original classic (as a Georgian-style house of the Georgian era) and a revival design, as Georgian architecture was a reference to Renaissance architecture, which in turn drew back to Greco-Roman ‘original’, that, was of course a synthesis. Browne has similarly built an original classic of his own: Brownian tailoring was his invention, a clear intervention in fashion’s timeline, but it also echoes across the ages and across oceans to the snobs of Savile Row and ardent sarti of Italy. Or as Browne said during our call: “My classic is based on twenty years ago, when I introduced that ratio that was shorter at the top and slimmer at the bottom. That’s really classic to me.”
Just as will no doubt be tastefully applied in Teviotdale, Browne established his tailored classicism by superimposing revelatory modernization on bygone conventions. Those pillar proportions held up the roof of this collection, as always, but beneath that core roof, Browne continued the tinkering with silhouette and fabrication that began during last summer’s couture debut in Paris. These experiments included a softer shoulder and an (even) slimmer jacket, intended to snap at the top of three buttons. According to him, Browne wandered far beyond his gray flannel, cashmere and tweed métier via excursions into cricket casual (as interestingly disrupted in the US as Georgian architecture), some nice cropped shooting suits and a very unironic turn of WASPy embroidered animals. to prepare. And as the lore goes, Browne added elements of the conventionally ‘feminine’, both in styling and clothing choice, to refresh and refresh the conventionally ‘masculine’ tastes of his sartorial base.
Browne’s canonical, British-made Goodyear welt brogues provided a key footwear foundation, but there were also more flexible, Italian versions of the Norwegian split-toe boot, the penny loafer and the insulated duck boot for stepping in. In addition to the Teviotdale bag, there were versions of the newly introduced Mr. and Mrs. Thom bag in stylish canvas and polished black leather. The rose and raven embroideries that climbed and floated around the clothing and also manifested themselves in the shape of a bag were a toast to Edgar Allan Poe, both his poetry and the ritual surrounding his resting place. Poe lies under a gravestone that, eerily enough, looks a lot like a handbag belonging to Mr. Thom. “It’s a collection of good classic ideas,” Browne said with classic understatement.
