Fashion Week

Thom Browne Men's Spring 2020

In an eighteenth-century garden, Thom Browne celebrates the union between the refined art of dance and the world of sport.
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Always the visionary and eccentric, Thom Browne's fashion confirms to be one of the unmissable events of the Paris fashion week, with its irreverent and cynical approach to any convention governing clothing. In the splendid setting of the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, the American designer recreates a sunny eighteenth-century garden complete with Manneken Pis and still models posed like statues on pedestals in the center of the room. The affected and beckoning notes of the harpsichord accompany the start of the show, while James Whiteside, the first dancer of the American Ballet Theater, makes his triumphant entry into the hall dressed in a flouncy seersucker tutu, blurring the boundaries of fashion in the high context and regality of dance, between pirouettes and spectacular grand jets. From a parade to a sumptuous royal party, the room soon comes alive with characters walking in the court garden, powdered models and fog-hoods walk frivolously and coquettishly with bunches of umbrellas, closed in wide crinolines or in spectacular two-dimensional repetitions of robes française, the theatrical dresses of the eighteenth-century Mesdames whose drapery was handed down to history by Watteau's gallant painting. Thom replaces precious silks with a very light seersucker, celebrating its comfort and functionality clearly in contrast with the frivolous apparatuses of eighteenth-century vestigial architecture, contaminating its coquetry with constant references to sport, the bourgeoisie's greatest passion ever since. They enter courtesy court from football, bags in the shape of balls, and mischievous parapube shells, a license of irreverent eroticism that goes well with the flirtatious and seductive atmosphere of this magnificent "Versailles Country Club."

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