Twelve years and nine collections in, Jerry Lorenzo has stepped up to the plate with the launch of his first full Fear of God mainline womenswear collection. After an initial first meet-up to see it on the rail in Paris during menswear this June, Lorenzo hopped on a call last Friday to bring Vogue Runway up to speed on the release of his label’s long-gestated entry into this fashion league of its own. “I finally felt I was at the point where I could transmit ease and elegance through construction and lightness,” he said.
Lorenzo is extremely completist in his approach to design: so did this leap from menswear, where he has an inbuilt affinity with his target audience, challenge that? “In menswear, I’m chasing a feeling, and it’s a feeling I know instinctively. So not being a woman puts me at somewhat of a disadvantage, because I can’t innately understand what that feeling is. That for me was the toughest part,” he said.
Part of the collection was rooted in a territory Lorenzo knows extremely well: sportswear, and particularly baseball attire. Here you could see him apply the processes of refinement and elevation of sportswear codes that he has long developed in menswear to womenswear pieces including a cropped, sculpturally shaped hooded jacket and matching drawstring-waist paint in slate-shaded nylon taffeta, and a black double-faced wool/cashmere coat with baseball collar and side-split hem.
Elsewhere, Lorenzo adapted his sensibility to this entirely new playing field without any apparent training wheels drawn from his menswear experience. A spaghetti-strap slip dress in sheer wool-viscose voile was effectively bias cut and body-skimming. Lorenzo said of it: “I just love the simplicity, that you can wear it as it is in the look book, super chic and straightforward. Or you could throw it on with some Doc Martens and a flannel, you know, and be super tough. It’s meant to seem simple, but it took 12 or 13 samples to get right.”
Elsewhere the vented hem of a dark ochre boat neck dress in wool was weighted to gather and fold with movement. A floor-length dress shirt was shaped to a familiar architecture but in a fluidly skittish hammered silk chiffon. Working in this as well as other unfamiliar fabrics including sheer jerseys and lightweight cashmeres was both “fun and frustrating,” said Lorenzo. Frustration or no, womenswear represents a learning curve he is determined to surmount: “I feel like this is the biggest thing—the most exciting new frontier for the house.”
