New York-based designer Todd Thomas embraces clothing design as his chosen medium with an audacious, entirely self-realized and fearless style. Transcending commerciality and celebrating the subtleties of the fashion milieu, each of his designs is ultimately driven by the notion of predicting nostalgia.
Born in 1961 in Murphysboro, Illinois, Thomas grew up in a rural environment where his family’s creative resourcefulness as a consequence of necessity made a big impression on him. Fantasy and self-actualization were necessities of his sanity. When he took off for St. Louis, Missouri, and it’s riotous punk scene at 17, his first creations came out of the need to make his own punk rock wardrobe. (Music has always been a driving force in both his personal life and career as an artist.) He nixed college in favor of learning to do by doing and came to New York in 1983, “right at the end of the party,” he says. The East Village looked like London after the Blitz with an atmosphere of boundless possibility, AIDS hadn’t yet taken its real toll and a wild art and music scene flourished around the Pyramid Club and Danceteria. Thomas dove into it like a mosh pit.
To hone his technical skills he went to work in the moderate world of Seventh Avenue manufacturer-designers, sponging up every aspect of sample making, cutting, pattern making, sourcing and production. The technical side of his craft, essential in his work and moneymaking endeavors, was indelibly strengthened there. Among his favorite freelance design jobs have been costume designs for films, including Rebecca Miller’s Angela (1995) and Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer (1997), which he found hugely rewarding. Some of his more recent collaborative work includes designs for high-profile televised fashion shows.
Even with having formal shows and a collection of his own, catering to the consumer market, his work has never been driven by a desire to appease Seventh Avenue. His own instincts have always fueled his designs in the manner of fashion heroes such as Elizabeth Hawes, designer, labor leader and McCarthy era blacklisted journalist, Spanish designer Agatha Ruiz de la Prada and the impeccable American master designer Geoffrey Beene. Thomas has always admired such designers, for their singular vision, absolute individuality and uncompromised reverence for craft. He never tires of analyzing the contradictions of covering versus revealing, modesty versus eroticism, and the prickly theories around ego and the thin veneer, created by fashion, designed to mask or to draw attention to the self before the world.
Constant pursuit of boundary-blurring has taken his work beyond the mainstream and into the realms of art, music and entertainment, with diversification and growth being a big part of his artistic identity. Crashing through all barriers of class and what is considered “appropriate,” it is little wonder that Thomas has supporters and patrons running the gamut from classic Downtown to Upper Crust, to Musicians, Actors and Artists. His Lower Broadway workspace is next to the legendary Mudd Club, where like his designs, the most disparate ideas and styles once collided, exploded and last, settled together.
Born in 1961 in Murphysboro, Illinois, Thomas grew up in a rural environment where his family’s creative resourcefulness as a consequence of necessity made a big impression on him. Fantasy and self-actualization were necessities of his sanity. When he took off for St. Louis, Missouri, and it’s riotous punk scene at 17, his first creations came out of the need to make his own punk rock wardrobe. (Music has always been a driving force in both his personal life and career as an artist.) He nixed college in favor of learning to do by doing and came to New York in 1983, “right at the end of the party,” he says. The East Village looked like London after the Blitz with an atmosphere of boundless possibility, AIDS hadn’t yet taken its real toll and a wild art and music scene flourished around the Pyramid Club and Danceteria. Thomas dove into it like a mosh pit.
To hone his technical skills he went to work in the moderate world of Seventh Avenue manufacturer-designers, sponging up every aspect of sample making, cutting, pattern making, sourcing and production. The technical side of his craft, essential in his work and moneymaking endeavors, was indelibly strengthened there. Among his favorite freelance design jobs have been costume designs for films, including Rebecca Miller’s Angela (1995) and Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer (1997), which he found hugely rewarding. Some of his more recent collaborative work includes designs for high-profile televised fashion shows.
Even with having formal shows and a collection of his own, catering to the consumer market, his work has never been driven by a desire to appease Seventh Avenue. His own instincts have always fueled his designs in the manner of fashion heroes such as Elizabeth Hawes, designer, labor leader and McCarthy era blacklisted journalist, Spanish designer Agatha Ruiz de la Prada and the impeccable American master designer Geoffrey Beene. Thomas has always admired such designers, for their singular vision, absolute individuality and uncompromised reverence for craft. He never tires of analyzing the contradictions of covering versus revealing, modesty versus eroticism, and the prickly theories around ego and the thin veneer, created by fashion, designed to mask or to draw attention to the self before the world.
Constant pursuit of boundary-blurring has taken his work beyond the mainstream and into the realms of art, music and entertainment, with diversification and growth being a big part of his artistic identity. Crashing through all barriers of class and what is considered “appropriate,” it is little wonder that Thomas has supporters and patrons running the gamut from classic Downtown to Upper Crust, to Musicians, Actors and Artists. His Lower Broadway workspace is next to the legendary Mudd Club, where like his designs, the most disparate ideas and styles once collided, exploded and last, settled together.
