Thom Browne Pre-Fall 2023 Menswear Collection

“Call me Ishmael.” Along with the in-retrospect first-wave cancel culture opus The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick was one of the great works of literature that emerged from the United States in the mid-19th Century. Interestingly it only became acclaimed in the century that followed, hailed as a disruptive amalgam of multiple forms of discourse ranging from the Homeric to the Shakespearean that served to recast the epic in novel form. Reading this lookbook, it hit you that Thom Browne’s disruptive amalgam of menswear’s discourses—specifically “American” ones—has been similarly transformational. Is that what drew him to Melville this season?

“Gosh,” said Browne. “I feel like I’m in an English Lit class.”

Well-dressed whales continue to be drawn compulsively to Browne, happily harpooned by his darkly witty skewering of the clothing canon. This season’s Melville conceit enabled the designer to return to one of his happiest hunting grounds, old school East Coast US prep. After observing how closely related Melville’s text was to Nantucket, Browne said: “I think the whole Wasp-y idea, the quintessential notion of preppy, came from this part of New England and some items in this collection really play into that.”

Hence the handsome duckboots and Weejun-esque moccasin boots, the boating blazers and the whale or yacht embroidered chinos. Patchworked Franken-suiting and skirts echoed prep-staple mashed madras shirting. There were some sneakers, more Ivy League than prep, that recalled the earliest types of the form.

Other discourses navigated included plaid tweeds and woolens fashioned into twinsets and pencil skirts as well as nautically-touched tailoring, which like everything here was reflected in the accompanying womenswear collection. Noted their author: “Between the men’s and the women’s I love using the same. And making peoples’ eyes see that they work for both a man and a woman.” Balancing those checks, Browne’s home harbor remained tailoring, proper and precise and mostly shrunken slightly in proportion, applied across the genders regardless of the convention of pant versus skirt. Pioneering footwear here included a knit sneaker disguised as a brogue.

Especially intriguing—along with the hidden Hector mermaids in the season’s toile de jouy-esque prints and intarsias—were the gentle venturings towards workwear in corduroy patch pocket outerwear and a handsome hickory-meets-pinstripe two-piece with an uncharacteristic deep-pleated pant shape. Ostensibly more Protestant and sober than his recent Cinderella installment, this Browne collection swept you in nonetheless.