PARIS – Thom Browne has brought his theatrical flair to Paris with a striking and arty installation for his new, temporary sales space at French department store Le Bon Marché.
“I wanted this [pop-up] to be more like a representation of what shows are nowadays: half installations, half collections,” the New York-based designer explained during a preview. “And I wanted it to be representative of what I do [vis-à-vis] those people who don’t know who I am.”
Visitors enter through a dramatically mirrored office space, featuring a silver-plated, mid-century desk (Browne’s favorite period), an old-fashioned typewriter, a pencil, a ruler, a stapler and a pair of scissors neatly arranged on its top, and surrounded by a sea of matching brogues replicated ad infinitum by the mirrored walls, feeding into Browne’s penchant for uniform, repetitive design.
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The installation is an amalgam of Browne’s work over the last decade, including his movielike 2009 show as Pitti Uomo’s guest designer, which brought to mind the tyranny of modernist work ethics, as well as last July’s “runway” show aptly labeled “The Office Man.”
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“Unofficially, we call this ‘The Office Man II,’” smiled Browne, clad in one of his signature shrunken Bermuda suits boasting white and blue seersucker stripes. “I love how [‘The Office Man’] represents what I do. It is such a strong visual experience for people that it might have a life past this,” he mused, already pondering a sequel.
A second room, giving a view of the actual collection, ticks all the designer’s fetish boxes: From the Midwestern bank office type of aesthetic to the pristine white floors, gray walls and matching blinds, which here separate the changing rooms from the retail space. Browne said he is drawn to mid-century forms because they are so “very clean.”
“I don’t like a lot of stuff, so that’s the furniture I like to live with, too,” he offered.
The pop-up, which is slated to run until Oct. 17, stocks men’s and women’s looks from the label’s pre-fall collection. The main line is to arrive shortly.
“It’s going just great,” said Trino Verkade, executive vice president at Thom Browne. “We are actually in meetings for re-orders,” she revealed, following the store’s soft opening on Saturday, which opened the door for Browne to a largely local, high-end clientele from Paris’ rive gauche.
For the first time available outside his boutiques, the brand’s handmade tailored suits, straight out of the New York manufacturing facilities Browne acquired six months ago, retail for around 6,480 euros, or $7,320 at current exchange, each.
A series of items designed exclusively for the new venue include whale-motif knits and laptop holders done in a Macintosh fabric. There are paper lunch bags selling for 50 euros, or $55, a pack (“for the chic kid going to school,” Browne mused) and vintage Champagne glasses served on an original Mathieu Matégot bar cart (“I love bar carts, I have them in all my stores”) along with a more commercially friendly version of the silver-dipped brogues, this time done in painted leather.
“When I was growing up my mother silverplated my first pair of shoes,” Browne explained, calling the futuristic collection a “an homage to my childhood.”
The mantra at the pop-up unit: Everything must go. Even the furniture, which includes some handsome Jacques Adnet chairs, a Harvey Probber desk and Maison Jansen side table, will be up for sale.
Browne, who operates three flagships and 14 shop-in-shops around the globe, assures that with the installation he has no airs when calling himself an artist. “It’s how I approach the shows – it’s not just about the clothes, but about an experience. It makes it more interesting to bring in things from outside the world of fashion.”
As fashion shows are becoming more obsolete with everyone able to watch the spectacle online, Browne said he wants to give people an experience they can live only live, and art is the perfect vehicle for that.
Well, “film works also,” he shrugged, before hosting a cocktail-cum-dinner at Le Bon Marché’s high-end bookstore, decorated in his signature grey hue, at which guests dined on fresh turbot and a tomato gazpacho.