From the fantastic fairy tale of the Little Prince to the gothic story of a lover in pain for the death of his beloved.
Like a year ago with Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Thom Browne has relied on a literary classic for the catwalk of his next collection.
A window with broken glass, the cawing of birds as an omen.
The lights of the Hudson Yards Shed come on across a snowy field, as the voice of Gilded Age actress Carrie Coon reads Edgar Allan Poe's sinister poem The Raven.
Surprises emerge from the trunk of a giant tree wrapped in a silk moirée duvet - four children dressed in black - while the verses of the song in octameters unfold: "With great clattering of wings" comes the visit of the crow who does nothing but monotonously repeat "Nevermore", tracing in a final crescendo the apex of pain in the lover.
Thom Browne, whose brand joined the Zegna group in 2018, is fascinated by American iconography (he has just curated an auction at Sotheby's on this theme) and his shows are real stories in which models and clothes come out of written page.
In Browne's world, everything adds up: Tom and her husband Andrew Bolton (the deus ex machina of the Met's Costume Institute) live in a townhouse in Sutton Place built in the 1920s for Anne Vanderbilt, second wife of William K.
Vanderbilt, whose first wife, Alva, inspired the character of Bertha Russell played by Coon.
Whose husband in the television drama, Morgan Spector, was sitting in the front row next to his real wife, Rebecca Hall and other celebrities including Janet Jackson, Rachel Brosnahan and Queen Latifah.
The sensitivity is decidedly nineteenth-century, the mood romantic-dark.
Black velvet crows inlaid on the wool of a white coat;
on a hand-woven tweed jacket the word Nevermore embroidered on the back.
The skin is scratched as if the claws of the crow had passed through it, transforming it into a hat on the head of Anna Cleveland, the first model to come out on stage.
Poe is a recurring motif of inspiration for Browne and this time there is a new crow-shaped bag that accompanies the famous Hector Browne, inspired by the dachshund that the designer shares with her husband, the most famous pet in the clothing industry. fashion after Karl Lagerfeld's Choupette cat.
Bags and shoes are covered in removable vinyl.
Of the 50 sets, almost all in black and white like the same number of tuxedos, the unisex skirts are long and narrow, worn under wide-shouldered tailored jackets and coats, but also very wide crinolines with the overcoat tied low on the shoulders and cinched at the waist.
A flash of gold closes the show: "When one story ends, another begins", and here is Alex Consani (in 2015 at the age of 12 she was the youngest trans model) who emerges wrapped in a gold jacquard cloak with engraved roses and inlaid crows, and underneath a hand-knitted gold cardigan: a golden insect like the one at the center of Gold Bug, another Poe story and who knows, perhaps the theme of another fashion show.
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