I thought I knew what a Thom Browne show was going to give me.

Grey tailoring. Perfect proportions. The little socks. The tiny ties. A few absurd silhouettes. Something wonderfully strange happening somewhere in the middle.

And then this happened.

Thom Browne’s Spring 2027 collection is not simply an extension of his visual language. It feels like a designer giving himself permission to go completely down the rabbit hole — and somehow coming back with the tailoring intact.

The show closed New York Fashion Week on September 15 at The Shed, and Browne turned the space into something between an enchanted garden, a children’s storybook and a very, very expensive nightmare about insects. A giant chrysalis sat at the centre, surrounded by green tendrils and leaves, while the collection moved through butterflies, bees, beetles, ladybirds and dragonflies. The concept continues the insect world Browne explored in his Spring 2027 menswear show in Milan, which drew partly from A Bug’s Life. 

But here’s the thing.

It doesn’t feel childish.

It feels liberated.

Because Browne has always understood that tailoring can be theatre. What makes this collection so exciting is the way he pushes that idea until the clothes stop behaving like conventional clothes and start behaving like characters.

The opening looks establish the rules. Precise tailoring. Checked suiting. Narrow ties. White shirts. Structured shoulders. The familiar Thom Browne grammar.

Then the grammar starts breaking.

A jacket becomes a garden. A skirt becomes a ladybird. A bodice becomes an insect’s shell. Checked fabrics collide with sculptural patchwork. Familiar preppy codes are stretched, compressed and rebuilt into these extraordinary rounded silhouettes.

And suddenly you realise what Browne is doing.

He isn’t abandoning tailoring.

He’s using tailoring as the skeleton for fantasy.

That is why the collection works so well.

The proportions are deliberately ridiculous — enormous cocoon-like skirts, compressed waists, exaggerated hips, sculptural surfaces — but underneath all that theatre is an extraordinary understanding of construction. Vogue noted Browne’s use of couture-like patchwork techniques to create three-dimensional carapaces, while some of the most intricate pieces used hundreds of tiny tucks and folds to evoke the anatomy of insects.

And then there are the details.

The little ties.

The white shirts.

The gloves.

The hats.

The absurdly precise accessories.

All those familiar Browne signatures become anchors. Without them, the collection could easily disappear into costume. Instead, they keep pulling everything back towards the house.

This is where Browne’s particular genius becomes apparent.

He can make something completely bonkers feel completely controlled.

Look at the images.

The green lawn. The black background. The models walking directly towards the camera. The blunt fringes covering the eyes. The scarlet mouths. The almost expressionless faces.

The photographs make the clothes feel even stranger because everything around them is so disciplined.

The ladybird isn’t presented as a joke.

She simply arrives.

Deadpan.

The blue checked suit with the eccentric hat feels like an Edwardian character who somehow wandered into a fashion show and decided to stay. The enormous monochrome silhouette looks almost architectural. And then there is the black widow look — perhaps the most sinister moment in the collection — where the fantasy suddenly turns dark.

That progression is important.

Because this isn’t just whimsical.

There is menace here.

The black widow appears above a heavily constructed, floor-scraping silhouette, turning Browne’s fascination with insects into something more gothic. Vogue described this as the collection’s most exquisite look, with hundreds of intricate tucks and folds creating a spiracle-like surface and the spider’s red marking positioned above the pelvis.

And then, because this is Thom Browne, we get the butterfly.

Of course we do.

The caterpillar enters.

The chrysalis appears.

The butterfly emerges.

It sounds almost unbearably literal when you write it down.

But watching the whole thing come together, it doesn’t feel literal. It feels theatrical. Almost operatic.

And perhaps that’s what I love most about this collection.

Fashion has spent a lot of time recently trying to convince us that seriousness equals sophistication.

Thom Browne seems to be asking a much more interesting question:

What if sophistication could be completely ridiculous?

What if craftsmanship could be playful?

What if luxury didn’t have to whisper?

There is something genuinely refreshing about watching a designer take an idea this far without becoming embarrassed by it halfway through.

And this is where Spring 2027 feels particularly important within Browne’s evolution.

His Milan menswear collection was already a return to structured tailoring and structured outerwear, with Browne explicitly describing the show as a reintroduction to the reasons people come to his work.

New York takes that foundation and blows it open.

The tailoring is still there.

The discipline is still there.

The American prep references are still there.

But now they’re being transformed into something almost surrealist.

A garden.

A cocoon.

A swarm.

A little bit of horror.

A little bit of childhood.

A lot of fashion.

And honestly?

I haven’t had this much fun looking at a runway in a while.

Not because every look is conventionally beautiful. It isn’t.

Not because every idea is easy. It isn’t.

But because Browne seems completely invested in the possibility that fashion can still make us feel something as simple — and increasingly rare — as wonder.

That might be the real story here.

Not insects.

Not metamorphosis.

Not even tailoring.

Play.

The permission to make something elaborate, strange, technically obsessive and completely unnecessary — simply because you can.

And maybe that’s exactly what New York Fashion Week needed at the end of this particular week.

After all the noise, the schedules, the parties, the phones, the front rows, the endless content…

Something that simply says:

Look what fashion can still do.

Thom Browne closed NYFW with a garden full of insects and a runway full of impossible clothes.

And somehow, against all logic, it felt completely alive.

This is Thom Browne at his most playful, most obsessive and most theatrical — and, for me, his most exciting Spring show yet.

The chrysalis is open.

And honestly?

I don’t particularly want to leave.