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Every new employee of the American fashion designer Thom Browne receives a “starter kit” of his brand’s clothing worth some ten thousand dollars retail, including, among other items, two gray suits, five white oxford shirts, one gray wool tie, and one white pocket square. An eleven-page PDF lays out, through visual aids and bullet points, the rules for how to wear what Browne refers to as “uniform” (never “the uniform” or “a uniform”). Top buttons must remain undone. Shirts are not to be ironed. Neckties, a required accessory, should be tucked tightly into waistbands. Suit pants may be swapped out for a pleated skirt, regardless of one’s gender; Browne, a proponent of androgynous dressing, has been putting men in skirts for more than a decade. Exceptions to the rules are doled out cautiously: the color navy is permitted Friday through Sunday but discouraged during the week; seersucker can be worn in the summer months, and white sneakers only on weekends.

One afternoon in early July, I went to Avenue Montaigne, a luxury shopping promenade in Paris’s Eighth Arrondissement, to visit Browne’s French headquarters. In two days, Browne would, for the first time, present a runway show as part of Haute Couture Week. He was one of only a handful of American designers in the past fifty years to be invited to participate alongside such storied couture houses as Fendi, Chanel, and Schiaparelli. But the timing for a high-fashion pageant suddenly felt off. A few days earlier, a policeman had shot and killed an unarmed teen-ager of Algerian descent during a traffic stop in the Paris suburbs, sparking protests across the country. I had flown in on a red-eye expecting to find a city on edge. Yet on Avenue Montaigne the mood was serene. Pedestrians sauntered along a row of European flagship boutiques nestled in battlements of creamy limestone: Gucci, YSL, Prada, Louis Vuitton. At No. 30, Christian Dior occupied the same site where, more than seventy-five years ago, the designer unveiled his nipped-waist New Look silhouette. Browne’s shop, at No. 17, is unmarked and open by appointment only, and when I saw the building, a blocky beige office tower that stood out from the elegant architecture like a bucktooth, I wondered if I was in the right place.

Then I spotted an unmistakable trio of Browne employees, smoking cigarettes on the corner. One wore a suit paired with high-top lace-up brogues. Another was in seersucker shorts and a matching cinched waistcoat. The third had on a cropped cashmere vest over a sleeveless oxford shirt. The outfits were all variations on the archetypal Thom Browne ensemble: a “shrunken” gray suit with jacket sleeves that end above the wrists, lapels as thin and sharp as paring knives, and pant legs that are cut some three inches above the ankle, revealing what Browne likes to call “male cleavage.” (His preferred fabric is Super 120’s wool twill in “medium gray,” a color that typically evokes the banal—pencil lead, gravel, wet cement.) The Thom Browne look has often been compared to Pee-wee Herman’s archly nerdy costume or to Don Draper’s office wear after a few rounds through the dryer, but it calls to my mind, too, some mischievous scamp out of a Roald Dahl book who is always conspiring to put a dead hamster in the headmistress’s bed.

Browne, who is fifty-seven and launched his namesake ready-to-wear business twenty years ago, is hardly the first fashion designer to implement a dress code among employees—for decades, the Belgian designer Martin Margiela has required staff to wear long white coats, or blouses blanches, at all times—nor is he the first to take a schematic approach to dressing his customers. Chanel’s little black dress was, as Vogue put it in 1926, a “uniform for all women of taste.” But, in an industry known for chasing novelty, Browne has built one of the most influential brands by iterating on a single idea. His deceptively humble goal is, as he regularly tells his staff, “to make the gray suit look interesting.” Once a menswear cult label, Thom Browne has in recent years become favored among celebrities who wish to signal that they’re game for fashion risk-taking. In 2018—the same year the Italian textile juggernaut Zegna bought a majority stake in the brand, at a valuation of five hundred million dollars—LeBron James, a longtime fan, bought his Cleveland Cavaliers teammates matching Thom Browne suits to wear to playoff games. (The fashion critic Alexander Fury told me that Browne suits hold a special appeal among “big fncking straight men” who like the look of muscles bulging out of fine tailoring.) Browne has put the actor Oscar Isaac in a pleated skirt and the actress Christine Baranski in a corseted tuxedo. The members of boygenius, the queer-feminist supergroup, are currently channelling the early Beatles in custom Browne suits on their world tour. The musician Janelle Monáe, who identifies as nonbinary, attended this year’s Met Gala in a Tim Burtonesque Thom Browne overcoat of black-and-white tweed that peeled off to reveal a giant sheer hoopskirt. Monáe told me, “In Thom’s clothes I feel part of a species of people who are pushing culture forward.”

For the couture show, Browne had rented the Palais Garnier, the city’s grand nineteenth-century opera house. His team had shipped the collection from New York in refrigerator boxes. On Avenue Montaigne, preparations were taking place in a temporary atelier two floors above Browne’s permanent showroom. Fifty employees sat hunched over high tables covered in white cloth, furiously making final adjustments. Some were embellishing a blazer with hundreds of sequins no bigger than a freckle. Others worked on a long overcoat of dove-gray wool interlaced with rows of silver beads, mimicking the undulating texture of silk moiré. Across a hallway, in a makeshift photo studio and fitting room, a photographer was shooting a male model in a shale-colored “bell” gown. One of a dozen such looks in the collection, it had exaggerated mutton sleeves and a conical skirt; a three-piece suit was inlaid down the center of the garment, giving the impression of one outfit skin-grafted onto another. Every now and then, a muffled tinkling sounded from one corner, where Anna Scott, Browne’s head of footwear, futzed with pairs of stilettos that featured brass bells on the heels.

Whatever individuality the uniformed staffers transmitted emerged in small personal flourishes—a streak of pink hair, a glimpse of a leg tattoo—the way a Catholic schoolgirl might radiate cool by adding safety pins to her pinafore. I’d worn shades of black and cream for my visit, but amid employees in uniform any color that wasn’t gray seemed as obtrusive as flaming red. The British master milliner Stephen Jones, who makes headpieces for Browne’s shows, noticed my baseball cap and asked, politely, if he might rid it of a smudge. Then he whisked it into another room to rub the brim down with a wet cloth.

Browne was standing in the middle of the fitting room, leaning against a marble table. He greeted me with a quick kiss on either cheek. Even in these surroundings, he stood out for the punctiliousness of his getup. He has a strong, square jaw and keeps his hair, now salt-and-pepper, in a tidy crewcut. He was wearing a tight sweater vest over his standard wrinkled oxford (“When everything is so well made, I think you need something that kind of throws it off a little bit so it’s not so precious,” he said of the wrinkles); on his muscular legs were snug wool shorts and a pair of Thom Browne knee socks. Browne’s own approach to uniform is unvarying. A former swimmer, he runs eight miles a day; until a knee injury forced him to use a treadmill, he was known to jog around the Central Park reservoir in tailored shorts and a cashmere cardigan. Five years ago, he stopped wearing long pants altogether. He recalled that places like the Ritz in Paris and the Four Seasons in Milan used to give him a hard time for wearing shorts to dinner. “Now,” he said, “they always let me in.”

Browne’s runway presentations are known for their narrative sophistication, but his references, he told me, are often “more Bugs Bunny than Proust.” His settings are pulled from children’s fables—an old-fashioned schoolhouse, an ice-skating rink, a pine forest filled with fake snow—often with a discomfiting twist. For his “Toy Story” collection, last year, he filled a room at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center with five hundred Steiff Teddy bears outfitted in his suits. A native of Allentown, Pennsylvania, Browne went to Catholic school until the seventh grade and served as an altar boy, and he has framed more than one collection around the theme of nuns and priests. For a show in 2012, he had his models emerge from coffins while a narrator told the audience that “they died for fashion.” Johnson Hartig, one of Browne’s oldest friends and the founder of the fashion label Libertine, told me that although there is “something draconian and a little dystopian” about Browne’s creative vision, “it’s all done in a tongue-in-cheek, innocent kind of way.”

For the couture show, Browne had found inspiration in the opening lyrics of the song “Fade to Grey,” by the British New Wave band Visage: “One man on a lonely platform.” He described the show’s protagonist, to be played by the Sudanese British supermodel Alek Wek, as “a girl who comes into a train station wearing a classic gray suit who is not so happy with her life.” The rest of the collection featured outfits representing various characters that the woman encounters on the railway platform, including luggage porters, gargoyles, a conductor, and a pair of high-fashion pigeons.

One of the couture birds, played by a male model named Florian DesBiendras, wobbled in from the atelier in full costume, which included six-inch, heel-less cantilever shoes. Browne craned his neck. “God, you’re so tall,” he said, giggling.