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In three days’ time, it will be December 3rd. That’s when Jerry Lorenzo and Adidas will press the button on the global release of Fear of God Athletics — a joint venture that’s been three years in the making.
For anyone starting to detect a theme here, you are correct: because (with apologies to De La Soul) “three” is the magic number when it comes to Fear of God Athletics.
For Adidas, the brand will be only its third “permanent” fashion partnership — after Y3 and Stella McCartney — in the triple-striped German company’s catalogue. For Lorenzo, meanwhile, Athletics is the third “pillar” in a long-plotted architecture that began in 2013 with Fear of God’s mainline, and has since extended to the wildly popular diffusion brand Essentials.
Online, there has been significant frustration that this long-announced joint venture has failed to fully manifest — until now. Yet as conversations with Lorenzo and Torben Schumacher, senior vice president and general manager of Adidas Originals, basketball and partnerships at Adidas, reveal, both parties are uninterested in generating short-term hype. Says Schumacher: “It’s our ambition to provide a clear performance perspective. And, quite frankly, to shape the look of sports performance gear in the future… to shape that next chapter of athletic sportswear and luxury.”
For Lorenzo, the performance aspect is fundamental: ensuring that the collection functions at the level a professional athlete would demand has been one reason Fear of God Athletics has spent so long in gestation. The aesthetic ambition, too, is uncompromising, as Lorenzo has been working to create a look that is both ahead of its time, and instantly “right” to the eye. “We’re perpetually chasing innovation that creates something fresh, but which also feels like it should have existed before,” he says. “Fear of God Athletics is post-collaboration, post-hype, post-heat. Instead it’s about asking, what is the next step to new functional ideas?”
An evolution of the existing overlap between fashion and sportswear (ergo athleisure), this new proposition adds functional performance technology, spliced with Lorenzo’s layered luxury aesthetic. The result is a sort of ‘performathleisure’.
Next month will see the start of an incremental release of the first Fear of God Athletics season offer. Amongst the first footwear styles will be a new low-profile, translucent-soled basketball sneaker incorporating a Lorenzo-adapted version of the “Predator stripe” that first featured on Adidas’s ’90s football boots. In apparel there are also pieces pitched as “functional attire” for hiking, as well as base layers and fleeces. They feature a distinct silhouette — broad in the chest, high in the waist, low in the arm — and a signature tonal palette.
Lorenzo adds that in addition to basketball, he, his team, and their partner team at Adidas are also developing items designed for baseball, running, football and American football for future seasons. He adds: “our intention is to touch all sports.” Whatever you call it, football seems an especially likely candidate for the Fear of God Athletics lens. Given David Beckham’s integral connection with the original Predator boot, his current success with Lionel Messi at Inter Miami (an Adidas partner), and his personal association with the luxury space, a tie-up in time for the World Cup across America in 2026 should be a cert.
Culture partnerships
Despite its name, Fear of God presents as a secular entity — this new brand is not to performathleisure what Christian rock is to music. Yet Lorenzo’s deeply held credo is inherent in his working practice. “In my religious belief, God designed himself three in one — it’s the very nature of who He is. So for us, this being the third pillar, and the fact that Adidas has three stripes… there’s a lot of layers to this relationship,” he says.
Schumacher is a 19-year Adidas veteran — he jokes he is “risking to be a lifer” — who has general oversight of what the brand calls “culture partnerships”. In recent years, Adidas has worked with multiple brands across fashion and streetwear. Today, however, he says: “At this point in time, it’s not good enough to just do a collab, put a logo on it, and then hope it’s going to work. So [with Fear of God Athletics] we have high ambitions to provide a new perspective, not just on lifestyle, but also sportswear and athletics wear.”
The scale of that ambition explains, in part, the lengthy timeline between the joint venture’s announcement in 2020, and this moment of its first fruition.
Schumacher says that in his experience, “magic output” demands a commitment to change on both sides of the table. “We believe in asking open questions. We do want to learn, we do want to grow as a brand, and therefore we invite those creative forces in to challenge ourselves. That isn’t always easy, but it gets us to a different place, which is why we have this partnership with Jerry.”
For Adidas, the introduction of Fear of God Athletics is serendipitously timed. The controversy-fuelled collapse of Yeezy is something it is keen to move on from. As the Financial Times columnist John Gapper recently ‘dad-splained’, it is also under pressure to increase its innovation in performance. “Rebuilding sporting credibility is a long struggle compared with buying heat off the shelf through a deal with an unstable rapper,” he said. Should Fear of God Athletics develop as both parties are suggesting, both of these imperatives will be met.
Lorenzo is not a designer who rushes into anything. His first fashion show in April happened only, he said at the time, “because I was ready”. He is similarly exacting when it comes to his partnership with Adidas.
As he puts it, “In every marriage, there’s a lot of arguments and a lot of compromises that you have to make on either side. But as long as you both see the future the same, then that will help you get through everything. I believe that we and Adidas share a vision of a new future. We’ve had to figure out how we get there in a way that makes the best use of both party’s resources and expertise. But we both share the belief that there’s a new space to be defined.”
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