Deep Media

The immersive world of fashion's Thom Browne

A year ago I wrote about the newly re-imagined Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian's design museum in New York, for my friend Betsy Pochoda, editor of The Magazine Antiques. Cooper Hewitt set out to reinvent itself as a center for highly participatory and deeply immersive experiences, not the musty storehouse of old stuff that design museums generally seem in danger of becoming. It even has an "immersion room" where visitors can use a digital projector to see what its wallpaper samples would look like on the walls. Now it's about to mount a show called "Thom Browne Selects," an "immersive environment" guest-curated by the fashion designer best known for gray flannel suits that stop well above the ankle. So when The New York Times asked me to interview him over the holidays for a piece on the show, I jumped at the chance.

Danny Ghitis for The New York Times

Thom Browne at his favorite lunch spot: The Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan.

Cooper Hewitt: Bringing museums into the digital age

It's a happening time for museums. The Louvre, the world's most-visited, drew 9.3 million people in 2013. American museums get more visitors than theme parks and major league ball games combined. In a world of ubiquitous electronic screens, this puts the lie to the notion that we're growing divorced from the physical world—or so it would seem. In fact, the appeal of museums goes beyond the objects they hold. Their popularity has a lot to do with the way they're merging the digital and the physical—and shifting their focus from object to experience in the process. 

Case in point: New York's Cooper Hewitt, a branch of the Smithsonian devoted to de­sign, which reopened last No­vember after three years of rein­ven­tion. I talked to the key peo­ple there for an arti­cle in the cur­rent issue of The Magazine An­tiques, and what I found was a place that had completely re­jected the idea of the mu­se­um as time cap­sule. Instead, this new Coop­er Hewitt sees itself as something quite different: