Thom Browne’s moment of reckoning came in 2009, shortly after Wall Street titans such as Lehman Brothers collapsed just blocks away from his Manhattan studio. In the months that followed, the American fashion designer’s small but acclaimed eponymous brand nearly crumbled as the financial crisis spread and unpaid bills piled up.
“Everything was days away from [going under]and I asked some business people, ‘What should I do?’ All of them said, ‘You should declare bankruptcy and start over’,” Browne tells me when we meet at his showroom in Milan. It’s located in a soaring 18th-century palazzo where Napoleon once lived for a few months following his victory in the Italian campaign.
“I looked at them like: ‘You don’t understand. I could not ever do this again.’ Emotionally, physically, I could not [and] there’s no way I’m going to work for someone else . . . I just knew after that, that I was never going to get in that position again,” he says — before joking, “I feel like Scarlett O’Hara right now.” He’s referencing the scene in Gone with the Wind when the heroine looks out across the civil war-scorched landscape of the American South and vows to survive — and thrive.
More than a decade and several investors later, the 57-year-old chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America and designer credited with reimagining the suit for the modern era has done just that. His first external investor, Japan’s Stripe International, gave the company the capital it needed to recover from the crisis, before selling its stake on to private equity group Sandbridge Capital in 2016.
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