Designer Thom Browne Is a Fashion Iconoclast. Now, He Wants to Shake Up the Art World in Miami—by Unveiling His First-Ever Public Sculpture

Thom Browne, the designer, is an
established visionary in the fashion world, acclaimed for his
cropped suits and unorthodox approach to tailored separates. But
Thom Browne the artist has, until now, maintained relative
obscurity. 

Browne has been making art on
the down-low for the better part of a decade. He paints minimalist
compositions inspired by Pointillist techniques, and counts giants
of 20th-century American painting—from Milton Avery to Andrew Wyeth
to Edward Hopper—as influences. Browne has also dabbled in
sculpture, integrating those works over the years into fashion
runway shows that are more like full-blown thespian extravaganzas
than industry events.

After keeping his fine-art
practice more or less under wraps for years, Browne is finally
stepping out with his first-ever public artwork: a 21-foot-tall
likeness of a palm tree that will go on view in Miami’s Moore
Building come December 5, when Art Basel Miami Beach opens to the
public. 

The palm tree, of course, is a
familiar icon associated with Miami and, more broadly, the idea of
stress-free beach getaways. Browne outfitted his tree’s trunk and
fronds with summery scraps of his signature pastel-hued seersucker,
gingham, and pincord fabrics. He anchored the monolith, which is situated beneath a
mirrored panel, in a black sand base. The juxtaposition is
intentionally jarring. 

“My artistic practice is really
grounded in exploring tensions,” Browne tells Artnet News. “I
always start by closing my eyes and thinking of an idea that is
complicated and [that] provokes me, and thus has the potential to
compel another person.” With Palm Tree I, he says, he’s
digging into “the tension between work and rest, and their
relationship to our inflated notions of the ‘American
Dream.’”

Within the conceptual space of
fashion, Browne has long sought to capture the mundanity and
repetition of corporate culture in the United States. His models
have toiled behind mid-century typewriters on a Florentine runway;
they’ve been reflected to infinity within a mirrored office set-up
on the New York Fashion Week stage; and they’ve assembled amongst a
grid of vintage desks for a choreographed performance piece at
Design Miami/ Basel, where Browne was the first fashion designer to
create an installation for the fair’s Large
platform. 

All of this is in addition to
Browne’s primary occupation as a suit designer. While he creates
with the contemporary professional in mind, his avant-garde
silhouettes defy the conventions of classic business
attire. 

“All this time, Thom has
been…upending rigid gender assumptions, exploring uniformity and
individuality, and investigating the monotony of everyday life,’”
says the project’s curator, Deana Haggag, who is also the president and CEO of the nonprofit United
States Artists. “We’ve become accustomed to reckoning with some of
these tensions, but Thom has been consistently and meticulously
considering them for years. I think it’s tremendous that we finally
get to see him expand fully into this artistic dimension of his
making practice.”

Browne began making art at
around the same that he began designing clothes.
“Of course, [art and
fashion] complement one another,” says Browne. “But in many ways,
they feel like different methods for me to explore and investigate
my interests and the world around me.” (He also now has a curator
in the family: his husband, Andrew Bolton, is the curator in charge
of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art.) 

Painting, Browne says, is the
medium that currently interests him the most, but performance
remains his bread and butter. While Palm Tree I doesn’t move, Browne considers the
sculpture to be a
performative artwork, “in
the way that it invites the viewer to interact with the piece
and the environment made for it through the sandpit and mirror,” he
explains. 

“I see this sculpture as an
extension of the fantastical staging and rigorous use of Americana
iconography that have come to underpin his career,” Haggag says.
“It’s just another vernacular by which Browne gets to explore his
curiosities, and deepen the traditions he is already steeped in,
like craft and performance.”

Palm Tree I
will be on view from December 5
until January 20 at the Moore Building in Miami’s Design District.
From 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. on December 5, David Velasco, the editor-in-chief
of Artforum, will host a panel discussion about the
artwork with Browne and Haggag on site in the Moore
Atrium.

The post Designer Thom Browne Is a Fashion Iconoclast. Now,
He Wants to Shake Up the Art World in Miami—by Unveiling His
First-Ever Public Sculpture appeared first on artnet
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