Early on in his life, while living in Los Angeles trying to become an actor, Browne lived with the designer Johnson Hartig, who’d later found the clothing brand Libertine. Inspired by Hartig’s experiments on vintage clothing, Browne decided to put old suits into a dryer to shrink them—just to see how’d they’d turn out. The results were promising and potentially boundary-breaking, and they acted as the prototypes for today’s signature Thom Browne shrunken suits.