Lil Uzi Vert, Whoopi Goldberg, and Alan Kim—yes, the cute kid from Minari—walk into a room. This isn’t the start of what would no doubt be an incredible joke; it’s just a Thursday afternoon in early October at Thom Browne’s flagship, in Lower Manhattan. That unlikely trio is joined by a handful of other wildly disparate luminaries: actors Lee Pace and Charles Melton, artists Amy Sherald and Anh Duong, and Portland rapper Aminé. All of them are draped in some variation of Browne’s meticulous gray flannel suiting—some in pants, some in shorts, some in kilts, Whoopi cocooned in a breathtaking floral cape. They’re all here as card-carrying members of the coolest clique in fashion right now: Team Thom Browne.
“I wear Thom Browne every day,” Uzi says, with a neon-lit space helmet—the trademark of his new pseudonym, AstroCat—cocked back on his head. “It makes me feel more than unique. It makes me feel complete. It makes me feel like no one else exists.” That’s a pretty significant statement from a man who owns more designer grails than there are lobsters in Maine, but it’s a sentiment that an ever-growing number of stars—across multiple fields and mediums—seem to share.
Twenty years into an already iconic career, Thom Browne has found himself the unlikely architect behind some of the most electric celebrity moments in recent fashion history. LeBron James bought Browne suits for the entire Cleveland Cavaliers roster in 2018. Cardi B won the 2019 Met gala in a labyrinthe feathered Browne concoction, and over a dozen (!) attendees of the 2021 edition—Erykah Badu, Evan Mock, Sharon Stone, and Pete Davidson (in a dress) among them—rolled through in staggering Thom Browne looks. Dan Levy racked up a quartet of Emmys in 2020 wearing a Thom Browne pleated kilt, and the designer was a force at this year’s Grammys (Phoebe Bridgers in a shimmering skeleton gown), Oscars (Alan Kim in a short tuxedo), and New York Fashion Week (Russell Westbrook in a flowy white skirt).
All of this star power is a relatively new look for Browne, and it’s lent a fresh dimension and energy to his work. For someone whose reputation was built on the precise and methodical manner with which he approaches every aspect of his life—from his fastidious tailoring to his clipped-razor haircut—there’s a fluid, expansive diversity to both the people Browne chooses to dress and the clothes he puts them in. “The most important thing is that they’re true individuals,” Browne says of his taste in ambassadors. “They’re really true to themselves, and they do something. We live in a world where some people are famous for not doing very much, which is not interesting to me at all. I like people to put the time in and be serious about what they do, and not care about what anybody else thinks.”
Wearing Thom Browne, then, marks you as a member of an exclusive club—but, like, an actually good exclusive club. “His work draws a certain type of personality,” Amy Sherald says. “If I was walking down the street and I saw somebody who was wearing Thom Browne, automatically I would feel a kinship. The same kinship I feel when I walk into a room full of businesspeople and maybe one person’s an artist—you kind of already know each other.”
Browne’s longtime friend Whoopi Goldberg adds, “People are always surprised to see me wearing Thom Browne. People just don’t see me in it. They see tall, lithe people. They don’t realize that everything he makes, everyone can wear. It’s universal. He sees me [in his clothes], and I love that.”
When you speak to Browne’s acolytes about why they love his clothes, familiar themes quickly emerge. Sherald and Duong, a French artist, both described Browne’s suits as the perfect uniform they’d been searching for all their lives. “I love fashion, I love to dress,” Duong says, “but after what we went through in the pandemic, I want more and more for it to be easy. I don’t want to worry about what I’m going to wear, am I going to look good or not, is this dated, is this in fashion or not. Thom’s clothes are the ideal: You wake up in the morning, and it always looks good.”
(Nine-year-old Alan Kim, for his part, literally wears Thom Browne as his uniform every day, because Browne’s clothes happen to be “the best match” for his school’s dress code. He described his Oscars tuxedo as “very comfortable, like my pajamas.”)
For the men in the group, wearing Browne is all about the confidence it engenders. “There’s a real intelligence and sense of humor to Thom’s clothes,” Pace says, “and that makes me feel my best going into a room.” Melton admires the way Browne’s tailoring runs “that beautiful line of masculine and strong and feminine and soft. It feels like a second skin.” And for Aminé, the appeal is even simpler: “When I wear Thom Browne, I feel like I’m worth a lot of money.”
Twenty years after Browne designed his first high-water suits, it feels more than ever like the world has finally caught up to his vision. “That’s the key to success,” Browne says. “Doing your thing, and just doing it and doing it and not being swayed by everything else going on.” Browne’s loyal followers serve as proof of that. “It’s really the only thing AstroCat wears,” Uzi says, “because on the planet that AstroCat is from, they only wear a similar ensemble of suits that he can’t find on Earth. Thom Browne is the only one that reminds him of home.”
Thom Browne, Lee Pace, Charles Melton, Aminé: Grooming by Kumi Craig using La Mer at The Wall Group. Whoopi Goldberg, Amy Sherald, Anh Duong, Alan Kim: Hair by Ayumi Yamamoto at Bridge Using Kérastase; Makeup by Allie Smith at Bridge using Chanel.
From Louis Vuitton to Adidas, we’re honoring the people, the moments, and the outfits that made this one of the most fun and freaky years ever for fashion.
