September 25, 2023 Issue

Couture shows are describers’ dreams – so many gorgeous shapes, colors, and textures for the eye to devour. There’s an excellent description of one in Rachel Syme’s “The Suitor,” in this week’s issue. Syme profiles American fashion designer Thom Browne. She visits Browne’s French headquarters in Paris. She visits his Georgian-style mansion in New York. And, most arrestingly, she attends his couture show at the Palais Garnier, Paris’s grand nineteenth-century opera house. She writes,

During the next thirty minutes, more than fifty looks paraded down the runway. Alek Wek emerged first, wearing a plain Thom Browne suit and a head scarf. She sat onstage, on a piece of luggage, and remained there for the rest of the presentation, making eye contact with each model passing by. The collection was a kind of self-retrospective, but with Browne’s usual motifs carried to elaborate extremes. A series of coats had a plaid pattern—a Browne staple—that was made not with preprinted fabric but by crisscrossing colored threads through tiny glass beads. His typically kitschy nautical themes were pushed into riskier, more grotesque territory. One striped blazer featured a puffy golden lobster whose embroidered claws came up over the shoulders, as if it were trying to drag the model underwater. Browne had strayed from his monochrome palette in previous collections—his 2022 styles included sumptuous evening jackets in mustard, lavender, emerald, and cantaloupe—but his couture looks were nearly all in shades of gray. The effect was to attune the eye to subtle contrasts—the way a gown juxtaposed shiny pewter satin with matte taffeta in a similar hue, or a pair of sequinned ombré trousers changed from charcoal at the hip to faintly ashen at the hem.

That “One striped blazer featured a puffy golden lobster whose embroidered claws came up over the shoulders, as if it were trying to drag the model underwater” made me smile. 

My favorite passage in “The Suitor” is Syme’s description of a Browne-designed wedding gown: 

She glided down the center aisle, wearing a beaded, sheer white garment that looked like a tuxedo jacket whose hem was melting to the floor. Two men in swim caps carried the train of the dress. From far away, the piece shimmered as if made of shaved ice.

Syme’s piece is a fascinating tour of Browne’s surreal world of gargoyle gowns, shrunken suits, men’s skirts, and starfish codpieces. I enjoyed it immensely.

Postscript: Another highlight in this week’s issue is Helen Rosner’s “Tables For Two: Foxface Natural,” featuring superb description, e.g., “Sitting at the bar one evening, I swirled a glass of a Vermentino-Moscato blend that looked like apple juice and tasted wild and metallic, like beautiful gasoline.” The newyorker.com version of this piece is even more delectable, containing several additional passages, including this zinger: “A meal at Foxface Natural is a calm affair, even as the dining room thrums with the grimy, horny bass line of Peaches’ ‘Fuck the Pain Away.’ ”