Autumn 2022 Collection for The Brand Fear of God for Ready-Made Clothes

In the past, Fear of God designer Jerry Lorenzo numbered his collections—his last, released in late 2020, was the Seventh Collection—but this time he broke with that tradition and instead decided to title it: the Eternal Collection. If that has a certain gravitas, that’s exactly what he had in mind.

“For everything we design,” the designer told Vogue from his Los Angeles studio last week, “we are chasing a feeling of perpetuity and timelessness.” (Fashion conspiracy theorists, take note: the designer had a Louis Vuitton tome sitting on his desk.) Designed during the pandemic, this collection was crafted almost entirely in Italy; the textiles and artisanship Lorenzo encountered there made him consider what kind of pieces would be worthy of such skill. “We have access to better fabrications, and construction, and the hand of everything felt so long-lasting,” he said. “Those were the guardrails we were playing within, and we kept asking ourselves, Does this feel eternal?”

For Lorenzo this meant two things. First, he thought about which garments had remained central components of a man’s wardrobe over the years. Secondly, he whittled things down to their essence—silhouette, fabric, color, and construction. Anything extraneous was jettisoned. He pulled a double-breasted suit jacket from the rack, and showed how it had been reduced to its key components: a shoulder pad, a notch lapel, two buttons. The front pockets, once visible, were hidden on the side seam. Its simplicity allowed you to focus on its core elements, most of all the way the matte fabric draped and tapered gently from its powerful shoulder line. It was almost like looking at a sketch of a jacket, rather than the jacket itself.

Regarding that first point, Lorenzo did a lot of thinking about items that have an everlasting quality—a Russell sweatshirt, a pair of Levi’s jeans, a Dickies jacket—and set out to capture that same spirit. So there is, indeed, a marled gray sweatshirt made in his signature cut, wide with dropped shoulders. An inky navy jacket in a boxy shape and matching straight-leg trousers are his version of luxury workwear with an echo of blue collar grit. The denim has a patinated, faded coloring and louche drape typically found in suit trousers (sweats and denim were made locally, in Los Angeles).

Collection