ReadytoWear

We’re in fashion’s Paris heartland at the late Karl Lagerfeld’s former Left Bank home, the ornately splendiferous Hotel Pozzo de Borgo, and we’re here for the spring 2026 show of Thom Browne, that most American of American designers, though really we’re somewhere else—deep space, light years away. We’re about to have a Close Encounter of the Third Kind at Browne’s show, which offered up a wildly entertaining and witty fantasy of fashion’s meeting with alien life. The tiniest downside to doing this review of Browne’s exquisitely wrought collection is that I will now out myself as a mega-nerd, because I spotted quite a few of his nods and references. I may be the only person in that audience, save for perhaps Hamish Bowles and the Costume Institute’s Andrew Bolton, also Brits d’un certain age, who for instance knew that the eerie swooping and throbbing electronica on the soundtrack at one point was Delia Derbyshire’s radiophonic theme for the British sci-fi show Dr. Who. (I may never live this down.)

Browne’s show opened with a phalanx of silver-haired and silver-skinned figures in his trademark gray tailoring, a green Mekon face embroidered onto the jackets’ breast pockets, solemnly walking through the corridors where Karl once presided, handing out cards at random to those in the audience. I didn’t get one, but I had a squint at Anna Wintour’s; it said …We Come In Peace… Meanwhile, the Close Encounters call and response music from Steven Spielberg’s movie was playing, building to a crescendo as the first of Browne’s collection landed on terra firma: his new jacket shape, here in gray seersucker, cut to hug the torso, with a shoulderline which curves forward, echoing that of the inset of a raglan sleeve; a fractional alteration of line which changed everything. “We were in a fitting and just playing with the shoulder,” Browne said at a preview. “I knew I wanted to develop a new shape. Will it feel different when you wear it? It does, yes. And then the proportion of the skirts, pleated, low slung above the knee… it feels very beautiful, and very young.”

Browne was right on both counts. His new jacket was worked a million different ways, while always retaining the essentially Thom Browne-ian East Coast athletic vibe, with his Americana seersuckers and repp stripes. The execution of so many variations in fabrications and techniques was impressive: tweeds light enough to float into the stratosphere; check formations woven out of silk chiffon; and, lined with striations of zippers or bands pierced with silver rings, these latter two giving a little punk hauteur, a kind of raw rebuke to the precision of their make. (It wasn’t just his jackets which had been lavished with work yet never lost their jauntiness; a series of coats towards the close of his show looked like they’d been dipped in constellations of beads or dripped with liquid mercury.)

That very first jacket, in gray seersucker, was one of several alien-like figures which punctuated the show. This one came with multiple arms, and narrow trousers also with multiple legs, accessorized with a green Mekon headpiece. This and Browne’s other strangely beguiling creatures in tailored form throughout the show were a testament to the terrific skills of his ateliers; a curving jacket and skirt which reminded me of the bulbous robot from Forbidden Planet, while others might feature a coat conjured out of a multitude of red striped varsity jacket sleeves, or a blue poplin and gray seersucker controlled explosion of a ball skirt—so big it could have its own gravitational pull—with chunky-knit chevron-striped preppie-ish sweaters.

“I like people to see both sides of how I design,” said Browne. “The conceptual and the real—but even with the conceptual pieces this season there’s something very real in how we approached them.” And Browne is even happier if you see beyond the dual expression of his work and interpret it through your own lens. After a grueling few days in Paris, his giddily fun show was a welcome moment of humor and joy. But of course, in his evocation of friendly, open armed aliens—we come in peace, indeed—it was hard not to see a sly yet serious comment on the state of the world right now; about who does and doesn’t get to be welcomed to a new world. But that’s just my interpretation. What we can all likely agree on: This was one terrific collection.