Thom Browne Fall 2026: See Every Look from the GQ Bowl Runway Show
Not so long ago, you might have been laughed at for suggesting that by 2026, pro football players would be clamoring to kit themselves out in high-fashion skirts. Sure, maybe when hell freezes over. Well, welcome to the second annual GQ Bowl, where Thom Browne staged his fall 2026 runway show with a vision of wintry fine tailoring set against a fiery backdrop at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor museum.
GQ Bowl is a celebration of the warp speed collision between football and fashion that is reshaping both disciplines, and no American designer has influenced that phenomenon quite like Browne, who points to how star footballers like Odell Beckham, Jr. and JuJu Smith-Schuster have donned his signature pleated skirt in recent years. “It was difficult to put athletes in skirts at the beginning,” said Browne before the show. “Now they’re requesting them because they love it and they have the confidence to pull it off.”
The GQ Bowl show drove Browne’s point home with catwalk cameos from future hall of fame wide receivers—and current tunnel-walk style icons—DeAndre Hopkins and Justin Jefferson, who strutted through the museum’s vaulted Rodin wing in tailored skirt suits and tricolor-tipped winter coats. If that wasn’t dramatic enough, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s booming voice filled the room with lines from Dante’s Inferno, a reference to the monumental cast of Rodin’s “The Three Shades” that loomed at the head of the runway. “The Legion of Honor has one of the most important Rodin collections in the world,” Browne said, “so it was about playing with the setting and story and weaving it through the experience.”
Like art and theater, sports are a cornerstone of Browne’s imaginative world of American suiting. “I don’t always see a difference between tailoring and sportswear,” he said. “I like the idea that they both are living within the one world.” In a subtle nod to Super Bowl weekend, there was an athletic thread running through the fall collection, with blazers cut in ripstop nylon and down wool overcoats laced with technical lining. Some of the coats became team uniforms of a kind, with Browne’s name and number (65, his birth year) embroidered on the back, while cricket sweaters and schoolboy blazers underscored the varsity theme. For the finale, the cast swapped their heavy duty hiking and motorcycle boots for gray, white, and black trainers from a surprise new Asics collaboration, the first time Browne has ever designed a proper sneaker collab.
What else will team Thom Browne be wearing next season? It’s Browne’s 25th year in business, which got the designer thinking about the very first suit he ever made, when he had the ingenious idea of a new silhouette that would make classic clothing look relevant again. He remade the gray wool herringbone fabric that he used in that OG look, adding other traditional menswear fabrics like pinstripes and glen plaids to this season’s lineup. “I feel like I’m reintroducing what I created 25 years ago,” Browne said. “You see how it has stayed very true to what it was at the beginning. And what that is is just reinterpreting classic tailoring through proportion.”
You also see how much Browne’s work has evolved within his singular design lexicon. How far he has pushed traditional menswear codes, and how he has turned short suits and pleated skirts into new classics, opening the door for athletes—and anyone!—to rethink how they dress. “Whether it’s football players or not, I like the normalization of these types of pieces and clothes,” Browne said. “I think it’s nice that people are seeing different things in a real way.”
