Travel becomes haute couture with Thom Browne

Grand Central Station is one of New York's most iconic places, the home of Thom Browne. A place visited by countless books and films, where the stories of individuals unfold against a backdrop that evokes a fairytale past, a mythology that turns the place itself into a proscenium. That is why Thom Browne's first Haute Couture show, held at the Palais Garnier in Paris, made the fashion show a performance, the stage a catwalk and the guests as many extras and actors while a mock audience of cardboard silhouettes, all in gray suits and ties, watched from the stands. The individual elements typical of a station, such as the pigeons that enter it, the gargoyles that decorate its roofs, the passengers themselves, the uniformed conductor, and even the train, all become elements to be sublimated into sartorial clothing that further expands and elevates the hyper-defined language of grays and preppy uniforms with which Browne narrates our times.

The summer season, as well as the fairytale theme of travel, always elaborated through Browne's palette of metropolitan grays, that of a city resident dreaming of exotic destinations, brings nautical imagery, effigies of golden mermaids, maritime scenery, maritime knots, to the tweed and seersucker coats. The story that this collection seems to want to tell is that of a summer journey of yesteryear, a fantasy never realized since its setting is not an exotic destination but the train station itself, the potential that ends up unrealized or realized in the very same fantasy of elsewhere. What matters is the journey and not the destination, Browne seems to tell us, when the whole variety of a metaphorical world passes us by as we wait to get where we need to go.

The dream ends when the train leaves - exiting the metaphorical metropolis that for Browne is the convex mirror within which reality is reflected, deformed. The designer's surrealism, evoked through the inversion of perspective between the stage and the stands, through silhouettes deformed visually and conceptually just as through a convex lens, is a simple narrative register to give artistic cohesion to a particular way of telling reality. In that grayness on which the designer insists, in that "fade to gray" that is nothing more than disappearance in an infinitely varied but also infinitely equal uniform, lies the true nature of dream and fantasy: the everyday, and not the exceptional, gives the measure of the dream we live. The spectators at the fashion show are part of that fantasy on the stage while, watching from the real stands, there are only gray extras - almost as if the actors in the fantasy that is Couture are acting for themselves, in front of an entirely invented audience.