Thom Browne’s Chilling Yet Gorgeous Fall 2024 Collection
Image courtesy of Daniele Oberrauch / Gorunway.com
Thom Browne is an American visionary. Closing out this year’s New York Fashion Week, he based his Fall 2024 ready-to-wear collection on Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 poem, The Raven. The poem centers on a narrator who yearns for his past lover, Lenore. Actress Carrie Coon narrated the poem during the show.
“I grew up loving Edgar Allan Poe,” Browne said at a showroom visit before his show, “and also, I do always like for people to see that I’m an American designer.”
This isn’t Browne’s first time taking inspiration from literature. His Fall 2023 collection, also shown in New York, centered on the 1943 novella, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Image courtesy of Daniele Oberrauch / Gorunway.com
The show starts with an elevated model wearing a black puffer jacket as the center of the chilling landscape. Wearing an extravagant tree headpiece, the black jacket flowed outward, engulfing the set.
Models traversed through snow around the puffer jacket, as children emerged from under the long and voluminous puffer. They trailed behind the walking model before sitting down and looking up at her holding onto a wooden swing. Another model emerges from the large broken paned window, and the cycle repeats, sans children. The puffer jacket’s tree branch arms fluttered up and down, as if being blown by the wind. The collection’s monochrome color palette reflected the cold tone shown in Poe’s poem, as mentioned in an interview with GQ.
Browne also made sure to showcase this collection on both men and women. “Guys and girls, they don't always want to see specifically men's clothes or women's clothes,” he said in the GQ interview. “With my shows, I want them to see just ideas that can be worn either by a man or a woman.”
Image courtesy of Daniele Oberrauch / Gorunway.com
Browne’s designs ranged in silhouettes, from tailored boxy suiting to deconstructed tweed coats with frayed cuffs and hems. Bows make a repeated appearance throughout the collection, on jackets, skirts, and sleeves. Off the shoulder trench coats were cinched, emphasizing the waist and overall shrunken jacket proportions. One look blended impeccable tailoring with deconstructed effects with an inner lining including the edges of a crisp white button-up. A garment label with “Thom Browne New York” peaked out from under the top half of the jacket.
Many models wore clothes patterned with ravens and roses. Tailored to perfection, a long and wide wide coat had soaring ravens all over it, the pattern growing more dense towards the bottom. Browne blended his signature shrunken suit jackets with suits of the 1920s, with their wide notched lapels.
Multiple patchwork tweed jackets had “...NEVERMORE...” printed on the back, the raven’s sole response to the longing narrator in the poem. Thick lacing ran down the sleeves, starting out as black and then transitioning into Brown’s signature stripes of red, white and blue dangling by her ankles. Models wore feather headpieces, veils, transparent footwear, and had sharp black nails resembling the claws of a raven.
Images courtesy of Corey Tenold
Alex Consani emerged wearing the final look–a gold knit cardigan with a matching gold and white poofy overskirt, embellished with ravens. Her and the rest of the models soldiered on fiercely through the snow, ending New York Fashion Week on a strong note. Thom Browne’s mastery in storytelling and tailoring lives on for another season.
Article by Daryl Perry, Contributor, PhotoBook Magazine
Tearsheets by Nicolas Harris, Graphic Design Intern, PhotoBook Magazine
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