I wrote this Thom Browne profile in 2005 and I wouldn't change a word

Mariah Carey has emancipated Mimi, and Gwen Stefani is Hollabacking at girls. The Devil Wears Prada is only a book. YouTube just launched, and I really want a Motorola Razr. Tom Cruise has just jumped on Oprah’s couch to declare his love for Katie Holmes. Phoebe Philo is at Chloé, Nicolas Ghesquière is at Balenciaga, and John Galliano is at Dior.

And in New York’s Meatpacking District—which still has actual meatpackers in it—an unknown designer named Thom Browne is convincing grown men to wear gray suits that look like they’ve shrunk in the wash.

Earlier this summer, I hosted a dinner to celebrate the launch of 10 Men USA, the latest extension of the London-based magazine empire, and the appointment of its editor, Dan May.

To say I have history with this magazine—and Dan—is an understatement. When Sophia Neophitou launched 10 Magazine in 2001, two of her deputies were Antony Miles, a ruthless editor who looked like a gay Henry VIII, and Dan, a former rugby player turned darling of menswear styling.

Dan, Antony, and I became fast friends. I was still a student at New York University, and they took me under their wing, which was wonderful for my career—and terrible for my liver.

They’d let me bunk with them when I came to London, all three of us in a one-bedroom flat off Charing Cross Road. They’d give me their hand-me-down designer clothes and bags. (I still have one of Dan’s original Mulberry Bayswater bags. Remember those?) They’d help me sneak into the fashion shows and parties they were invited to, and I wasn’t. We were a dream team. Of hangovers?

In 2005, I was a recently graduated (and recently fired from Vogue, which is a story for another Substack) freelance fashion journalist living with two roommates in a walk-up apartment in Brooklyn. Rent was $750 per month. I had no health insurance. I was hustling.

On a hot summer day, Antony gave me an editorial test: Would I write a first-person profile of this young designer, Thom Browne? If it was good, he and Sophia would assign me more stories. They’d put me on the masthead. And they’d pay me £1 per word!

Some of my earliest wins happened at 10. The first time I interviewed Tom Ford was for 10. The first time I covered Fashion Week was for 10. They commissioned me to write personal essays about online dating—on Craigslist, because Grindr wouldn’t be invented until 2009—growing a mustache, trying fitness fads, and all sorts of other humiliating tasks. I loved every minute of it. It was one of the places that taught me how to be a fashion journalist and, more importantly, gave me the chance to become one.

And this Thom profile holds a particularly big place in my heart.

Reading it two decades later was a strange little exercise in fashion archaeology. So much of what seemed radical about him then—the cropped trousers, the exposed ankles, the obsessive gray flannel, the almost militant commitment to uniform—has since become not only familiar, but enormously influential. What’s remarkable is that the Thom Browne vocabulary wasn’t something he slowly figured out along the way. It was already there.

Of course, Thom would go on to build one of the most distinctive American fashion brands of his generation, turn his theatrical runway shows into fashion-world happenings, and become chairman of the CFDA. And I would… start a Substack where I could embarrass myself by republishing things I wrote in my twenties?

Twenty-one years later, I found the story in my archives and reread it, fully expecting to cringe.

I didn’t. In fact, I wouldn’t change a word, and I’m excited to republish it here.