This past week­end I attended the Ini­tia­tives in Art and Cul­ture lec­tures at the National Acad­emy Museum and School of Fine Arts in New York. Lis­ten­ing to Thom Browne fence ques­tions about his pen­chant for unusual pro­por­tions and dis­tinctly fem­i­nine details for his menswear lines, I had to won­der why Brooks Broth­ers both­ered to have him cre­ate a range of women’s clothes too. If he is design­ing the same capes and the same pro­por­tions in pant and sleeve lengths for both sexes, why do we need to label one for boys and the other for girls? The answer has to be marketing.

Girls have always been ok with bor­row­ing from the boys–from tweed blaz­ers to pink shirts with lit­tle ponies on them. The same can­not be said for men; guys gen­er­ally don’t com­monly try on women’s clothes. And I must admit, when I first saw Browne’s col­lec­tion with its flood lengths and shrunken sil­hou­ettes, I thought these ideas would be flat­ter­ing on a woman. The hems empha­size the nar­row­ness of an ankle or wrist; this in turn adds more impor­tance to the frame of the body.

Ok, so this is the junc­ture where the jew­elry writer in me kicks in. I can draw a com­par­i­son here to the ear­ring, which actu­ally does the same thing. Between two dan­glers or gem-laden studs is a lovely face. If the ear­rings are long, they bring the focus to your smile and to the allure of the shoul­ders. Smart, small ear­rings shift the atten­tion to the eyes. The pur­pose of an ear­ring, as I have men­tioned in ear­lier posts, is to frame the entire vis­age and bring light to it. The orig­i­nal owner of Fred Leighton once told me that if you (as a jew­eler) make a great ear­ring, women will come flock­ing. He wasn’t kidding.

The lan­guage of pro­por­tion, and mar­ket­ing it, is some­thing keenly under­stood by Browne, although you would not have known it dur­ing the question-and-answer seg­ment of the dis­cus­sion. I asked him what influ­ences his choices each sea­son and he replied eva­sively, “it is always evolv­ing.” Con­sid­er­ing he arrived for the event with a ret­inue that included two mod­els dressed in his designs, and his mom, he could have been a lit­tle more transparent.

Then I asked him about the pieces he has cre­ated for Harry Win­ston. I made spe­cific men­tion of proportion–a con­cept so fun­da­men­tal to jew­elry design. This time he was less cagey and expressed that he was look­ing to expand the design con­cept for a watch, which had been pre­vi­ously “tight and small”. It will be inter­est­ing to see how the col­lec­tion does in the market–and he expressed the same sen­ti­ment in his response to me. Jew­elry design is so very dif­fer­ent from cloth­ing; while you can retain an aes­thetic that trans­lates to other areas of fash­ion, for exam­ple, bags and shoes. It takes a broader and more pow­er­ful sense of style to be able to express it across a board that includes pins, rings, and neck pieces. Marc Jacobs has done this with vary­ing suc­cess in cos­tume jew­elry and trin­kets (I’d like to say I like his doo-dads, unfor­tu­nately I find many of them not wor­thy of his orig­i­nal­ity) and I would really love to see what he would do with pre­cious mate­ri­als because I think he has the chops to do it successfully.

Not so sure of Browne though, and have to agree with him and say that his play­ful pro­por­tions, although done with a metic­u­lous eye for detail, require a con­stancy which can be hard won and results from an inti­mate knowl­edge of who you are as a designer and what really works on paper as well as on the flesh. Schiaparelli’s jew­elry designs always had some­thing in com­mon with her cou­ture. Even if the piece wasn’t deriv­a­tive of any­thing, you could sense where she was head­ing with the idea because the motif gave you a clue or the col­ors or shapes were typ­i­cal of her palette.

I’ve seen a few of the pieces Browne had done for HW and so far, they look like pretty stan­dard fare. How­ever, I have not seen the watches. The dia­mond cuts are great for the cuff links—trapezoidal; but that’s more HW than Browne. To dis­tin­guish him­self with the jew­elry line, Thom Browne has to do for adorn­ment what he does for clothes which is some­thing dif­fer­ent and noticeable–ideas that will get tongues wagging.

Why not cre­ate pieces that either a man or woman would wear–personally I think that is what Browne does best. Pro­por­tion makes all the dif­fer­ence and he clearly has the savvy to pro­pel this state­ment. Please Mr. Browne, make it a golden one.