Images: Thom Browne

Thom Browne Closed New York Fashion Week With the Same Bug Story He Started in Milan

By Hermes Sole·Sep 18, 2026·Thom Browne

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Thom Browne closed New York Fashion Week's spring 2027 season on Tuesday, September 15, with a womenswear show inside The Shed at Hudson Yards built around Disney's "A Bug's Life." The venue was staged as an indoor garden scaled to the room — giant leaves and flowers, a chrysalis at the center of it — and the collection moved through a single life cycle: the show opened on models in grey, sheer-panelled caterpillar bodysuits, and by the finale the same figures had turned into butterflies in full color.

A grey tailored look from Thom Browne's Spring 2027 show: a dotted grey seersucker suit and coat with a striped tie, worn with a straw boater hat wrapped in red tulle netting

The insects ran through construction, not just print. Ants appeared in gold bullion thread and red-and-black intarsia, moths and flies as sequined appliqués, and dragonflies in jacquard paired with butterfly-wing embroidery for a mosaic effect worked into fitted corsets and narrow skirts built to read as shells. Grasshopper-shaped clutches, beetle attaché cases and a tortoise-frame bag draped in leather butterfly wings carried the theme into accessories, and several pairs of heeled shoes were built as insects outright, including pumps with bug faces and 3D antennae. Underneath the bugs, the tailoring stayed recognizably Browne's: madras plaids, checked cashmere, grid-check piqué, pebble-grain and patent leather.

The show closed on a look built from butterfly wings, worn by Kai Schreiber — the daughter of Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber, who watched from the front row — after she emerged from the garden's central chrysalis. It's the clearest single image the show offered of its own premise: a designer walking his own tailoring through an actual metamorphosis, from grey to full color, on one runway.

A black shift dress from Thom Browne's Spring 2027 collection with an abstract butterfly print in pale plaid, sky blue and red across the bodice and skirt, worn with a white point collar

This is the season's second bug show, not its first. In June, Browne staged his men's spring 2027 collection at Palazzo Serbelloni in Milan — his first runway show in Italy since 2008 — and filled the palazzo's courtyard with 400 seersucker flowerpots arranged in a grid. That collection ran the same premise through menswear: bees, dragonflies, frogs and crickets embroidered across seersucker tailoring, beekeeper veils under boater hats, and a men's-collection bride closing the show in a white suit and a pearl-beaded tulle veil. Browne told Wallpaper he got the idea watching the 1998 film on a flight from Milan to New York, drawn to the story of an inventive ant rallying the other bugs against the grasshoppers.

Running one film's premise across two collections on two continents in a single season isn't a runway gimmick that lives and dies with one show — it's a bet that a house can sustain a single idea at scale for months and have it read as a through-line rather than a repeat. Thom Browne's own site frames the work in similar terms: it describes classic tailoring as having undergone "a consistent metamorphosis" at the house over twenty-five years, dating to the five suits Browne started selling out of a by-appointment West Village shop in 2001. Insects were the vehicle this season; the argument underneath them is the one Browne has been making the whole time — that his tailoring keeps changing shape without changing what it is.

Correction: An earlier version of this story put dragonflies in sequined appliqués; Thom Browne's own show notes place them in jacquard, paired with butterfly-wing embroidery for the mosaic effect. It also described the accessory bag as caterpillar-shaped; it's a tortoise-frame bag draped in leather butterfly wings. And it described the Milan finale bride's headpiece as a tulle cape; the house's own copy calls it a tulle veil hand-beaded with pearls.