When Fear of God designer Jerry Lorenzo went to Jay-Z’s annual Academy Awards afterparty last month, he showed up in a surprisingly chill suit. On a night where many celebrities, inspired by the golden age of Hollywood, or just the cutthroat age of social media, dress in over-the-top interpretations of black tie, Lorenzo went a much simpler route, wearing a large, lapelless jacket and a trouser cut with a comfortable straight leg over a wool-silk T-shirt. This doubled as the unofficial debut of Fear of God’s latest collection, dubbed “Eternal,” unveiled earlier this month, and a reflection of Lorenzo’s approach to dressing. He calls it “smooth jazz.”
“You want to play in the background and not bother people,” Lorenzo says. And, like a great smooth jazz track, your outfit should reward someone who wants to pay closer attention. “If you hear that note that not everyone else hears”—if you appreciate the way a jacket is shaped, its fabrication, the way it drapes—“then it's a really cool conversation,” he says. By way of explanation, Lorenzo cites an unlikely source of fashion inspiration: “I’m always,” he says, “chasing this Kenny G reference.” Is that the first time a designer on the cutting edge of cool has copped to putting legendary saxman Kenny G on their proverbial inspiration board? Probably, but that’s menswear in 2022 for you, where a designer long unjustly lumped into the streetwear category, Kenny G, and a bunch of ultra-covetable suits are all part of the same conversation.
Eternal, which arrives after two years of development, is Lorenzo’s proposition for anyone who also wants to chase Kenny G—or, perhaps more likely, who wants to take fashion advice from one of the hottest labels going. In past collections, Lorenzo explored what American archetypes like denim and workwear would look like when melded with Fear of God’s easy, athletic silhouette. These were trendy ideas, in that Lorenzo was using them to set trends. Eternal, the designer tells me via Zoom from his stark concrete studio in L.A., represents a new direction. “I think that so much of what's created today has a timestamp of when it's released,” he says, “and so I was really chasing this transcendence of time with each piece.”
Bottling timelessness, it turns out, is much harder than starting a trend. To do so, each piece has been stripped down to its essence, Lorenzo explains: Blazers are big and squeaky clean. Overcoats and jackets feature elegantly droopy lapels, if they have lapels at all. Trousers, rendered in cashmere and dusty suede, are cut with voluminous legs. In the lookbook, the trousers pool around the models’ slip-on sneakers and western boots, but they don’t look messy—just effortless and comfortable, like your favorite pair of vintage sweatpants. None of it seems designed for Instagram—though, of course, the clothes will look damn good there.
Lorenzo started Fear of God a decade ago because he couldn’t find the perfect T-shirt, and his new emphasis on tailoring doesn’t reflect an aesthetic shift, despite his luxury streetwear bona fides. He’s simply applying his well-honed Fear of God logic to the suit. Lately, Lorenzo has been craving pieces he’ll want to wear for years to come—blazers and coats and trousers he can “just buy one of and not have to worry about getting another one next season,” as he puts it. It’s a need that extends, naturally, to the Fear of God customer. “How are we providing solutions for our consumers instead of just medication until next season?” Lorenzo asks.
It’s no small feat to reinvent the classic, seasonless suit. Lorenzo approached the task with clear parameters in place. Like every piece in the collection, Lorenzo wanted the tailored pieces to look like they “could have come out in 1986 or 2040,” he says. “We removed as many opinions as possible from the design details, to really place them in this eternal space,” Lorenzo says. So he hid the pockets along the side seams of the blazers, and agonized over the shape of the relaxed notch lapel, given that blazers are often dated by lapel width. Lorenzo cites the suits worn by Tom Cruise in Rain Man as a reference for the ultimate notch shape he landed on, and Giorgio Armani—who killed the power suit in the early ’90s with a softer and more sensitive take on men’s tailoring—as inspiration for the generous proportions and easy attitude of his new suits.
“The shape is strong enough that you can put trousers on and go to a wedding and be appropriate, or you can put a hoodie underneath it and it still works,” says Lorenzo. But he also clarifies that the word “oversized” is essentially verboten at Fear of God HQ: “The intention is to make something comfortable that doesn’t look oversized, that doesn’t look messy.” How exactly Lorenzo figured out how to put Justin Bieber in an enormous double-breasted blazer without making him look sloppy, as he did for the 2021 VMAs, feels more like a marvel of engineering than a trick of fashion design. “That's the 10,000 hours, that's the work that goes into it,” Lorenzo explains. “That's where the love, by those that are interested, can really be seen.”
Bieber is one of many celebs—including Kit Harington, Seth Rogen, and Dwayne Wade—who have embraced Fear of God’s beautifully un-trendy tailoring. If Hollywood red carpets have lately felt like an arms race for the most viral (or meme-able) outfit, a Fear of God suit feels like a deliberate choice to wear something real—something that’s been made not for the internet’s benefit but for the wearer. Case in point: A few weeks ago, John Mayer took the stage in Atlanta in a slate gray blazer with those dropped lapels and a large, squared-off silhouette. Not many guitarists rip solos in double-breasted blazers, but Mayer looked both sophisticated and incredibly comfortable in his. Mayer is currently touring his ’80s-homage album “Sob Rock,” and Lorenzo says the parallel between the music and the clothes isn’t coincidental. “[Mayer] modernized the feel of that early ’80s yacht rock, where it feels familiar, but it also feels new,” Lorenzo says. “I’m trying to do the same thing with clothing, and we just connect on that level.” Lorenzo confirmed that Mayer, a longtime Fear of God fan, is the only person who has pieces from Eternal so far.
Though Lorenzo started exploring this new tailoring look back in 2020, when he collaborated on an easy-wearing capsule collection with Zegna, the pandemic has only sharpened his goal of knocking the stuffiness out of the suit. After all, in the past two years he’s moved a lot of sweats to a lot of people through Fear of God sister line Essentials, and it’s just good business to start putting that customer in suiting. But Lorenzo also believes deeply in helping people feel not just more comfortable, but more like themselves. “When through the week you're cozy and on the weekend you have an event to go and you hop in a suit, you don’t want to hop into a proportion that is totally different from how you've looked the rest of the week,” Lorenzo says. “How do we free this consumer up so when they hop into a suit, it doesn't feel like, ‘Oh, I have to approach this guy differently.’ It's just, ‘Hey, this is just a continuation of who I am.’”
Lorenzo knows what that feels like because he is that guy. Before he put his Oscars afterparty fit on, he was wearing what he wears every day: sweats and a bandana. “Comfort, effortlessness and sophistication are the real guardrails of Fear of God,” he says. “So we've never put anything out that was uncomfortable, and I think that is informed by a California lifestyle, that is informed by selfishly how I want to feel when I get dressed. We all want to feel comfortable—not only in our clothes, but in our skin.”
