The first outfit was announced by the swell of the fourth movement of Mahler's Fifth Symphony, a piece of music that would tug at the heartstrings of anyone who was, say, swept away by Visconti's Death in Venice at an impressionable age. And that's really the only kind of age that interests Thom Browne : the moment when one's sense of one's own difference from everyone else finally throws caution to the wind and shoots off on an intensely personal trajectory. "I had fun", the designer announced cheerily, after a show that confounded the essential constructs of modern menswear (let alone American sportswear).
His work is so utterly sui generis that one is compelled to decompress from one's standard outlook and marvel at the force of will that proposes a passementerie shorts suit (and I do mean short) with button-down, thigh-high socks as a viable alternative to a man's quotidian garb. "Propose" really is the operative word, because the show was, as ever, a smorgasbord of suggestions on Browne's part, almost any one of which could be adapted for a customer not quite ready for a full-scale plunge into Thomworld. 
