“People say, ‘Oh, you’re a designer.’ And, yes, I design. But I’m an artist first.” Hearing this statement at a first-time Fashion Week showroom appointment would usually have me mentally rolling my eyes, framing my excuses, and edging toward the door. Coming from Josué Thomas on the last afternoon of his debut stand-alone Paris presentation, however, it computed.
The reason for this was neither the easel we were standing next to nor the paint-spattered suiting tailored from Thomas’s twill drop cloths on the racks in the hall of this fancy apartment behind Avenue Montaigne. It was more that Thomas’s approach to streetwear, when the very term streetwear in fashion has become freighted with semiotic shade, is so elevating: He sees it as art. Because who’s to say it can’t be?
Gallery Dept. was founded by Los Angeles–born Thomas, now 40, back in 2016. He started out by reworking vintage pieces on a made-to-order basis, deconstructing then reconstructing, and typically marking the garments with paint. For a while, around 2018 or so, his “L.A. flare”–reworked Levi’s and Carhartts became a silhouette-shifting sensation. In 2020, Virgil Abloh told The New York Times: “I see Josué as making a new canon of his own, showcasing what Black design can do.” As for those flares, Abloh called them “the most important new cut of denim in the last decade since the skinny jean.” More recently, there have been merch collaborations with Migos, Lanvin, and the ubiquitous Ugg.
