A New Thom Browne Doc Showcases the Seriously Playful (Playfully Serious?) Nature of the Designer

“Regardless of how deep you try to dig with Thom, you’re not going to get anywhere.” So says Thom Browne’s longtime friend, Libertine designer Johnson Hartig. “And that’s the enigma of Thom… He won’t let any of us know, except through his clothes.”

You’ve seen his gray suits: shrunken, slim, sharp. You’ve seen his runway shows: outlandish, theatrical, laborious. You’ve seen him: clean-cut, shorts-clad. You know Thom Browne, the brand, but how well do you know Thom Browne, the man? A new documentary by Reiner Holzemer, Thom Browne: The Man Who Tailors Dreams, offers itself as an answer to this question. The documentary premiered at the DocNY festival over the weekend, and a wide release is expected in 2025.

“What does Thom Browne’s work say about him?” wonders Tim Blanks, the former Style.com contributor, “that is a question I’ve asked him a million times, and of course he ducks that question,” says Blanks in the film. It’s a query I’ve directed at the designer myself before, too, and each time he’s dismissed it with a warm and unswerving smile.

Browne backstage at his spring 2023 show in Paris.

In the 95-minutes of run time, Holzemer weaves a melange of home movies of Browne’s childhood in Allentown, Pennsylvania, with interviews from the designer, Anna Wintour, Andrew Bolton, Whoopi Goldberg, Cardi B, and his sister Jeanmarie Wolf. The film follows the designer through the making of five collections, beginning with his fall 2022 show in New York through his debut women’s couture show in Paris in June of 2023. The result is a compelling portrait of Browne’s work that, even if it doesn’t answer every question it poses, leaves the viewer with a fuller understanding of how, as Blanks put it, he made of the gray suit “the foundation stone of a half billion dollar business.”

Here’s what you learn: That Browne is “American through and through,” so says Bolton, his partner of many years. That “even when he is asleep he is 100% in control,” as Wintour says, recalling sitting next to him during an overnight flight through which he sat straight and kept his signature uniform on. That Ralph Lauren made him the designer he is, and that’s according to Browne himself. And, in the words of journalist Amy Fine Collins, a friend and client, “he does not speak more than he needs to.”

Browne with his team before his fall 2022 show in New York.

What Holzemer also helps illuminate is the tension between Browne’s playful design ethos and his much mythologized self-discipline, which stems from his upbringing as an athlete and his parents’ emphasis on hard work (“my parents were very serious in making sure we tried hard in doing something well,” says the designer).

The collections Holzemer features, including the fall 2022 lineup shown to an audience of teddy bears, and the spring 2023 menswear season that revolved around the jockstrap, highlight Browne’s sense of humor and perversity. His world is built as tight as a tie knot, but the crucial counterpart to his hyperfocus and precision is a sense of play, and that, underneath the formality of his uniformed world, he is not entirely self-serious. “The last thing people needed to see in my shows was the gray suit,” offers Browne as an explanation for his conceptual and narrative-driven catwalk presentations.