Cole Escola, Martha Stewart, Addison Rae, and Thom Browne walk into a bar…It’s not the beginning of what would be a legendary joke were I swifter with a punchline, but how my evening started last night at The Commerce Inn in the West Village at Thom Browne’s super-secret, no-press, VIPs-only, surprise non-Fashion Week (but definitely Fashion Week) dinner, co-hosted by Mary Todd Lincoln herself in the body of a blue haired, blue eyeliner-ed Escola.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If a label throws a NYFW bash and we (the press, or Vogue, if we’re being self-congratulatory) isn’t around to tell you all about it, does it make a splash? Well no, which is why my GQ colleague Sam Hine and I were given special dispensation to be the outliers in the room. And so in a room of very intimidating—and sometimes surprisingly funny—guests, all legendary or budding luminaries, including the aforementioned Stewart and Rae plus Patti LuPone, Issa Rae, Ella Emhoff, Morgan Spector, Christine Baranski, Havana Rose Liu, Alton Mason, Fred Hechinger, Ib Kamara, and many more, there was little old me, and Sam, hanging out, Voice Memo recording app in hand, to tell you all about it.
The gist of it is that Browne, who showed a career-best collection in June at Couture Week in Paris, was sitting on his unreleased spring 2025 assortment. In lieu of a runway show or a lookbook release, he thought of putting together a room full of “people who represent excellence” and dressed them in pieces from the collection. The idea was to have folks wear the collection styled as they would, rather than as Browne & co. would for a show. Said Browne: “I didn’t want anything to take away from the couture show, and I wanted this to be a moment, but the collection wasn’t the main thing. I did want people to see that Thom Browne clothes are actually wearable and real, and that you can see them on different types of people, but what I wanted out of this evening was to see Martha, to see Patti, to see you [yes, dear reader, I shed a tear here], and have a night of people who in my mind represent real excellence, people who are the best at what they do.”
The decision to make this happen in New York was a no-brainer. It’s Browne’s home, the birthplace of his label, and, as the chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, the designer said he felt a responsibility to engage in the city during Fashion Week.
But the real goal, and the real charmer of the night, was to harness and leverage the weirdness that has made Browne’s world one people want to be a part of. “I’m so inspired by people who are true to who they are regardless of who that is, and the confidence that takes,” said the designer in a post-dessert moment of well-earned earnestness, “as my business is growing, I want this to be what people see, I want everything about Thom Browne to grow in the best way, but to never lose that special kind of thing that we all represent, and that’s just…not easy.” In the landscape of American fashion Browne has become a shining example of what a designer can accomplish when they remain committed to be the best version of themselves, not anyone else’s. “I always felt like I am totally on my own, and I respond to people just doing their own thing, who present exactly what they want people to see of them,” he continued, “it may be a weird way of putting it, but I’ve done shows based on this idea, of the island of misfit toys (see his fall 2022 collection).”
Except that in the room last night, misfit is the utmost compliment. Take it from Escola, the evening’s co-host, who Browne met and became enamored by after dressing them for the 2024 Met Gala: “It’s the biggest compliment,” they said, adding that the evening was “a birthday-slash-wedding-slash-first kiss.” And, once again in a post-desert, final-moment-of-the-night jiffy of earnestness: “I still can’t wrap my head around why people want me to wear their clothes. It means a lot that this is coming from my play; I wrote this play and this character that is very much my voice and that other artists whose work I admire are responding to it and wanting to include me in their world, it’s everything.”
But as things go chez Browne and certainly chez Escola, the evening was not just “chic as hell,” in the latter’s words, but also hilarious. At some point between the salad and the main course, one of the folks at my table, the kids’ table (complimentary), decided to step outside for a ciggy. Then went the next, and the next, and the next. Those of us non smokers felt left out, and so we joined. Given that we were in the presence of Rae, pop star-in-the-making and inarguable queen of TikTok, we thought to document our group with a 15 second clip to her latest single “Diet Pepsi.” The result was chaotic, weird, funny, and, once again, chic as hell. I showed it to Browne before we said our final goodbyes, who put his reading glasses on, glanced at my phone, and said: “I just love that we’re all here, we’re all different ages, we all do our thing, but together.”
