Thom Browne has been chosen as GQ's designer of the year. Perhaps you've seen him in his shrunken suits. GQ explains:
"Browne’s sleeves are boys’-department short; his jacket stops just below his belt line. His tie is tucked into his pants and clipped to his deliberately unironed oxford. His suit pants are actually shorts: They’re mailman-tight, and they’ve ridden up, revealing a band of squashed-flat leg hair. He’s wearing ankle-high black athletic socks with his giant Frankenstein wingtips, because in Thom Browne’s world, you show ankle. He looks like Pee-wee Herman’s boss.
"Browne started selling suits like this one in 2001. He had five of them made, wore them around town as advertising, persuaded his friends to buy them, turned his apartment on the Upper East Side into a showroom-atelier. In the beginning, the suit struck some people as ridiculous, and sometimes it still does. That’s part of its power. Made you look. Also, though, it spoke to guys fed up with the distressed-jeans arms race, with designer seed-feed caps. Guys who’d done the dirtbag-chic thing and were boomeranging toward reactionary squareness."
