Learning Your Stripes: Studying Thom Browne at Notre Dame

“When you’re here, you feel that you’re in such a safe, enclosed environment,” says the designer and CFDA Chairman Thom Browne over a bowl of honey-blended yogurt and granola, his gray knit vest catching and softening the springtime light. He’s discussing his impression of The University of Notre Dame, both 30 years ago, when he was a student, and today, when he’s back in South Bend, Indiana to partake in a class dedicated to him called “Strong Suits: The Art, Philosophy and Business of Thom Browne.” “I think college should be the four years that you really start opening your eyes and seeing what things mean. At Notre Dame, structurally, you can do that [with their academic offerings.] But culturally, there’s certainly a lot more now than when I was here.”

It’s morning at The Morris Inn, the school’s hotel, and the clanging dining annex is full of suited C-Suite types, who are here for a summit. There’s some irony that Browne is in the room: The man has built a distinctive and clear-cut brand image in large part by reformatting the suit, albeit not in the conventional corporate manner, as perhaps frames the scene. Uniforms–the suit being the sort of pinnacle of the term–are important to Browne, but not when they’re generalized. Rather, he believes, it’s when they’re rendered within a certain containment and rigidity–a kind of aesthetic campus, if you will–that the wearer’s personality shines through. In that mindset, much can be drawn in parallel to college life. Especially at as sovereign a school as Notre Dame.

Broadened educational thinking, conviction in self-presentation, and the experience of Fighting Irish academia were among the topics dissected in “Strong Suits,” a Spring semester course overseen by Professor Meghan Sullivan at Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study. Browne appeared at the last installment of the class, two weeks before the elective’s 14 students were due to hand in their final projects. He would answer questions from students, faculty fellows, and fans alike–a sort of half bookish, half star-struck grilling on everything from hot button queries (“The big non-softball question, how does your fashion intersect with politics?”), to philosophized observations (“What does it mean to refuse a community?”), and even dream celebrity placements, dead or alive. Browne, who is Catholic, said “I’d dress Jesus.” (Notre Dame itself is also Catholic.) 

The far-ranging food-for-thought was the class’s proof of concept, and exactly the sort of thing Institute for Advanced Study fosters: ethical critical thinking and prismatic knowledge application. Participants in “Strong Suits” enrolled from a range of majors including economics, marketing, and studio art; Notre Dame has no dedicated, ongoing fashion course. But it didn’t hinder the conversation. It seemed that, akin to Browne’s uniforms, there unfolded a sizable discourse within the control of the topic itself.