It’s usually exactly when you reckon that you’re pretty familiar with a designer’s imaginative vocabulary that they prove you wrong by throwing a curveball. As we sat down to discuss this latest Fear of God Eternal collection, Jerry Lorenzo delivered his: “So I’ve had this girl on my mind. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched Crocodile Dundee? It’s his girlfriend. And if you go watch that movie, then I think you can see her in these images.”
The look that caught Lorenzo’s attention was the loose, long-jacketed, notch-lapel gray suit jacket and high-waisted cuffed-hem pant worn by Sue Charlton (Linda Kozlowski) as she arrives in New York with Mick “Crocodile” Dundee (Paul Hogan) in that fair dinkum 1986 classic. Teamed with her blue scarf and white loafers, this ensemble sparked what Lorenzo called “this Brooks Brothers emotion.” Taken literally, you could indeed see Kozlowski’s sporting tailored slouch in this collection, most especially in look 25. More broadly this look catalyzed Lorenzo to apply his Fear of God filter to late ’80s to cusp of the ’90s off-the-rack American tailoring: democratic corporate uniform.
That filter worked to pull the source material’s proportion and silhouette into even more exaggerated versions of its original exaggerations, lowering jacket skirts, hoiking up waistlines, broadening leg widths, and making the all important break even more accentuated than those cuffs in Kozlowski’s inspirational suit could ever allow. To mirror this process, he blew up the scale of pinstripes way beyond the conventional, then applied them to full suit and shirting looks that included a first for Lorenzo: ties. These were mostly square-tipped and straight, so the conventional knit-tie shape, but delivered in the same fabrics as the rest of the ensembles. “I just felt I couldn’t tell this story fully without a tie,” said Lorenzo: “I really wanted to be able to put a tie on and for it to not feel stuffy. And so it was a big challenge for me to land this and still feel casual.” He added that once landed he had not needed to let that flourish punctuate ever look; there were clean crews and loose scarfs and smocked necks too.
Elsewhere he turned the original styling inside out by drawing the jackets closed then tucking them in the finely constructed high and pleated pants to create a sophisticated jumpsuit effect. The fabrics looked sometimes purposefully flat on the eye—Lorenzo suggested that one serious upside to having his new office in Milan is the ability for ever deeper fabric research—and there was a lovely, coldly-neutral, palest blue wool marled with flecks of darker blue in a wide lapeled jacket and drawstring pant menswear two-piece. Mock-croc leather and suede semi-casual outerwear and robust wool melton on more formalized overcoats were also part of this Eternal season offer. Contained within it was an intersection between the currents of tailoring and sportswear as expressions of an idealized Americana, all modulated via Lorenzo’s forensically applied and very specific variety of lush minimalism.
