Exhilarating!

Though it may be hard to imagine, the codpiece was once an object of deep seriousness. Glover’s notion for the book arrived during a hilarious visit to London’s National Portrait Gallery, where a “crepuscular” room filled with Tudor family portraits includes a drawing copied from a destroyed portrait of Henry VIII, “standing in front of his father, spread-legged looking like a mighty Tudor oak, just the way in which this is positioned on the wall, and the way I was standing, the more I looked at it, the more it became evident to me, in a blinding flash of insight, that this entire painting pivoted about this enormous codpiece. It was like a capturing wheel at the center of the painting, but the entire world pivoted about it, and that made me laugh inwardly.”

The codpiece that started it all: Hans Holbein the Younger's drawing of a now-destroyed portrait of Henry VIII and his father, which author Michael Glover saw in the National Portrait Gallery. Courtesy of David Zwirner.

“There was a certain amount of humor” with which the codpiece was treated during its heyday, he explained, “but it was quite often serious. It was part of the grandiose self display, certainly with Henry VIII. [He] needed a lot of grandeur of self display, because the Tudor monarchs were not long on the throne. He needed to show himself off and he always did.So it was a weapon. It was power.”

A Titian portrait of Charles V, which appears in Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art. Courtesy of David Zwirner. A Giovan Battista Moroni portrait of Antonio Navagero which appears in Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art. Courtesy of David Zwirner.

That self-seriousness has only added to its comedic potential over time. Male vanity, of course, used to express itself visually with outrageous displays of myth-building tailoring and portraiture, while it’s now become something more like an oil-and-vinegar combo of preening and insecurity. The insecurity often gets in the way of the preening, unfortunately, and perhaps that is why despite the codpiece’s brief relevance to the history of fashion, it has returned again and again as a token of male virility disguised as performance wear in sports and dance. That’s the spirit Browne’s seersucker runway captured, with its pirouetting ballerinos in tutus, codpieces proudly displayed like badges, a sendup of the overt sexual signaling of historical fashion. (Panniers, the women’s basket-like undergarment that made the hips two doors-wide, got similar treatment in the collection.)

Thom Browne Menswear Spring 2020 Getty Images Thom Browne Menswear Spring 2020 Getty Images

A runway fashion observer may not know “the history of it, but they know of a codpiece,” Browne explained in a recent interview. That vague sense of historicism gave the collection its edge of madcap humor, underscoring that the codpiece’s more familiar contemporary cousin, the cup, is far from immune to that same ridiculous interpretation. Rendered in seersucker and affixed to dresses, suits, and dresses that looked like suits, the codpiece, Browne said, was “somewhat for decoration, and for humor.”

Thom Browne Menswear Spring 2020 Getty Images Thom Browne Menswear Spring 2020 Getty Images

Browne is not a designer who lets his collections hang heavy with laborious nods to other centuries, periods, or cultures. The levity of his work comes from his indulgence of a dilettante’s attitude towards his references: “I don’t really approach [fashion design] from a historical point of view,” he said. ”It’s more taking ideas and almost reintroducing them in ways that aren’t a time reference.” That’s why he loves endlessly tweaking and freaking the suit, an object so deeply embedded in the greater style consciousness that even minor changes, like his floodwater hems, drive people nuts: “We still get reactions, even 15 years later. Some people hate it—they don’t understand why it exists, and I love that about it.”

“I just like to make people see things differently,” Browne said. “And make people either love it, or hate it.”