“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. 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 coutur.