Constantin Brancusi Was the OG Menswear God
When “Brancusi: The Artist and His Studio” opens at the Museum of Modern Art in October, curious crowds will have a rare opportunity to see some of Constantin Brancusi’s most iconic sculptures stateside. And menswear enthusiasts will have a chance to make the Romanian sculptor their new menswear North Star. Though he’s most known for his impossibly smooth sculptures, so polished and buffed that they appear untouched by human hands, it’s the artist’s own lived-in wardrobe that really deserves a second look.
Fashion has already been engaged in a nearly century-long love affair with Brancusi, from an iconic 1938 image of a model in an Elsa Schiaparelli dress posing between two of his sculptures through to Daniel Roseberry’s Spring 2026 Schiaparelli collection, staged in the same Centre Pompidou gallery that had housed a Brancusi retrospective a year earlier. Today, admirers as disparate as Lauren Manoogian and coffee-depot-meets-cool-clothing-store Colbo chase the Brancusian spirit with sculptural shoes and plaster-colored clothing.
But hear me out: There has never been a better time to join the Brancusi-ssaince. This year marks his 150th birthday, and with the Centre Pompidou’s Atelier Brancusi, the usual resting place of his works and former studio, closed for renovations until 2030, Brancusi has entered his Eras era, setting records wherever he appears.
His bronze Danaïde just sold at Christie’s for an unprecedented $107.6 million (thanks, perhaps, in part to a Nicole Kidman-starring promo video) and Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie has already attracted more than 100,000 guests in two months to its own Brancusi exhibition. Both the Berlin and forthcoming New York shows spotlight Brancusi's famous sculptures alongside tools, hand-carved furniture, films, and photographs, but it’s one iconic 1394 self-portrait utilized for MoMA’s promo poster that demonstrates the appeal of Brancusi himself.
In the image, the artist perches atop a plinth in his cavernous studio wearing simple, structured workwear that could slot seamlessly into a Loro Piana ad: A chunky knit sweater, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, paired with pale trousers and dark work boots all slightly smudged with dirt and stains. Chunks of stone surround him, as pieces from his Endless Column series rise upward.
It may be the most badass someone has ever looked while covered in dust, and establishes Brancusi, the man, as integral to the works he became famous for. At the Neue Nationalgalerie, I found the same image opposite a small recreation of the atelier that he lived and worked in for four decades. Standing there, I studied the creases in his chinos and the heavy knit of the exact kind of sweater I try and fail to find every winter — and then I lingered in front of every other image of Brancusi I could find.
One shows him as a young man in 1904, wearing a utilitarian trench coat with a canvas bag slung over his shoulder during his 745-mile walking trip from his Romanian home to Paris. Another batch of studio self-portraits expands on the style he settled into: Thick, structured pants, often in a wide-leg cut that wouldn’t look out of place in a acai collection, paired with canvas work smocks or collared coats and topped with a flat cap. The archive also shows another side: Brancusi suited up in a well-cut tweed three-piece, living up to his reputation as a central figure in the Parisian avant-garde.
Brancusi’s style is made transcendent by the contrast between what he wore and what he made. Polished, filed, and buffed to perfection, his works were defined by their formal purity and lightness; defining details were smoothed away until each work was reduced to the most essential curved lines, transforming figures into abstraction. The same instinct that drove him to strip sculptures down to their purest form also seemed to inform his wardrobe: Nothing was there that didn’t need to be.
Now, as we celebrate his 150th birthday, the best gift we can give the man who influenced everyone from Schiaparelli to his former pupil, Isamu Noguchi, is a reconsideration of the clothes he wore to create these iconic shapes. Workwear was once meant to be worked in (and sometimes still is), but I’m not suggesting we all need to pick up a hammer and slam it into a slab of marble.
I just think that in an era where chore coats are being co-opted for military contractor merch, and AI is turning creative labor into a rarefied skill, it might be nice to add an artist to your moodboard who actually put in the work and looked great doing it.
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