Tues. 09/15/2015.
Thom Browne does not do things in an understated manner. His ideas are as lofty and singularly unique as his bombastic and oft over the top presentations. This Spring outing for 2016 did not, in any configuration, shy away from that aesthetic at all. It was a uncompromising and one could say, even for all it's inventiveness and whimsy, a rather narrowly, yet effective, exercise in tedious redundancy. Browne is a master at developing an idea and seeing it through in every possible permutation, to the point of obsessive compulsion that blots out any kind of individual discussion and focuses on a central idea with no room for discourse. Browne presents an idea and laser focuses on that idea until he has exhausted the source material until it's a empty husk and then moves on to the next idea. In saying all that, there, in execution and conceptual output, is a continuity of form and idea that permeates all his collections, a signature leitmoitv, in the style of Wagnerian opera. This collection was no different, you can spot a Thom Browne silhouette and garment from a country mile away and that is why perhaps his oeuvre is so intriguing, for it is spectacular in it's tunnel vision-like oneness, yet it is also in that deeply singular style, impossible to not recognize.
So, to go into intricate, and extensive analysis of a Thom Browne collection is a definitive indulgence in futility, for Browne earmarks his collections as a one-dimensional treatise into the mind of Thom Browne with no deviation from the path. SOOOO, what was the message this time around? With the school desks and pleated skirts, we were in the slightly fetishistic and symbolically prim world of Japanese school girls. How Browne executed that reference into a compelling fashion narrative, was embodied by heaps and heaps of technique served up with a generously lavish hand and tons of surface interest and Trick-The-Eye applications. Motifs of symbolic Japonica were in full flower, from Geisha's and Mount Fuji to Sakura blossoms, all executed in masterful techniques of patching, embroidery, and more. That every exit was a Jacket/Pleated skirt (with or without a topper surmounting it) combo aided in giving one a heaping eyeful of visual indigestion, was the drawback of such elaborate and intricate application of embellishment and technical prowess. There wasn't a single moment of optical relief and the collaging and piling on of more and more as the collection progressed on, seemed to overload the senses, even with it all being quite ecstatically exquisite, and made the viewer wish for a palate cleanser of some sort to break up the insurmountable monotony.
Browne's collection was by no means a failure or even a repetitive headache, but it was certainly a ceaseless bounty of similarity that congested the eye with a non-stop cavalcade of redundancy, and with all it's beauty and tricks, still left one not satiated and in need of a visual Pepto-Bismol.
That's All.
Bye4Now!
