Thom Browne sees great value in the repetition of a single notion to hammer home a point. Consider his signature gray suits; his signature shrunken silhouettes; his signature tricolor grosgrain ribbon. Relentless reiteration has ensured his authoritative ownership of said aesthetic shorthands, which, alone, have little signifying value.

Nevertheless, there are some ideas that are so intrinsically embedded in the general vernacular it’s foolhardy to attempt to claim authorship. Like, for instance, camouflage, a disguising device that has been in use since the First World War. More recently, it’s been deployed by designers toward the contradictory goal of camouflage designed to make you stand out, rather than blend in. That’s been particularly co-opted as a house trademark by Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli at Valentino, whose use of the pattern has established it, in the past few years, as a masculine equivalent of florals for her. Namely, a bit of a visual cliché, but one consumers buy into eagerly.

That brings us, in a roundabout way, to Thom Browne’s Fall 2016 Moncler Gamme Bleu show. Which wasn’t a game changer, nor even a Gamme changer. A bunch of models marched out, in camo from toe to head—including face-concealing balaclavas. The camo was red, white, and blue. There was a camo cavalcade, which camped out in a giant cube in the center of the runway, a gargantuan hangar space. Guess what? The box was camo, inside and out, the latter transparent, so we could see the camo being camouflaged.

Squint at the colliding pattern, and you could try to decipher the construction techniques—intarsia fur, beading, patchwork—jigsawing fragments of yet more camouflage together. I wonder if the camo-cube catwalk represented a box Browne is hoping to break out of; or perhaps just the bunch of corners he seemed to have designed himself into? The latter was more evident than the former, as the gimmickry at Gamme Bleu felt like business as usual. Nothing less, but nothing more.

It’s troublesome because you feel like Thom Browne is a better designer than this, with something more interesting to say. His contribution to the cannon of modern menswear is significant, and yet his Moncler shows have quickly devolved into gaggy stage dressing. It’s difficult to imagine any men wanting to wear these garments, despite camouflage being so ubiquitous and easily digested into the male wardrobe. In the end, while that camouflage made the Moncler man more visible than ever before, this collection wound up obscuring Browne’s considerable talent.