American designer Thom Browne has made gray an infinite color. His women's collection takes the codes of classic men's tailoring and subverts them with surgical precision. It's a constant play on proportions: jackets are shrunken to structure the bust, while skirts play with complex pleats and asymmetries.
This season, the luxury "schoolgirl" aesthetic gains a new level of sophistication. The signature details remain: the tricolor grosgrain ribbon (blue, white, red) hidden in the slits or buttonholes, and the cashmere knits adorned with the famous four white bars . An intellectual, rigorous, and delightfully unconventional style.
About this selection
Thom Browne founded his house in New York in 2001 with an idea as simple as it proved fruitful: to take the charcoal grey men's suit, an absolute archetype of sartorial conformity and American social conservatism, and subject it to a series of proportional manipulations so precise and systematic that it eventually became its own opposite—a subversive and liberating object whose radicalism is all the more effective for borrowing the very language of what it deconstructs. This conceptual approach, which consists of using the most established codes, laden with social meaning, as raw material for elegant and rigorous transgression, is what fundamentally distinguishes Thom Browne from all designers who have worked on tailoring before and after him.
The house's women's wear applies this same logic of precise and surgical subversion to the codes of classic men's tailoring, creating a tension between the formal rigor inherited from tradition and the freedom claimed by unexpected proportions and associations. The shrunken jackets, whose deliberate shortening and narrow cut structure the bust with an authority that belongs neither to conventional tailoring nor traditional women's fashion, and the skirts with complex pleats and carefully calculated asymmetries create silhouettes of intellectual coherence and sophistication, made all the more desirable by the discreet humor running through them. The tricolor grosgrain ribbon in blue, white, and red, concealed in slits and buttonholes like a secret signature for initiates, and the cashmere knitwear adorned with the house's iconic four white bars constitute a system of recognizable signs that transform each Thom Browne piece into a declaration of belonging to an aesthetic and intellectual community of remarkable precision and consistency.
At Actuel B, we offer a selection from the Thom Browne women's collection, available in our stores in Avignon and Arles as well as on our website. Jackets, skirts, knitwear, and accessories are presented by teams trained in the house's rigorous and unconventional universe, with the personalized advice that characterizes our approach to multi-brand luxury.