Jerry Lorenzo had never heard that Richard Gere was only cast in American Gigolo
after John Travolta, who had been first choice for the role and
accepted it, had second thoughts and dropped out. “Wow! I can’t imagine
Travolta pulling that off, much as I love him.” And it’s true, at least
in terms of the movie’s significance to fashion. Thanks to Saturday Night Fever
Travolta was so emblematic of the disco aesthetic that he would surely
have overwhelmed the movie’s Giorgio Armani wardrobe, where Gere, in his
first leading role, appeared as fresh to the eye as the Italian’s
radical tailoring.
That historic Sliding Doors moment in
casting came up during a Zoom call for this second part of Lorenzo’s
seventh Fear of God collection as we zeroed in on Look 47. Apart from
the logo on a crossbody bag, I suggested, Lorenzo’s combination of loose
leather navy blazer, gray marl sweater, and pleated taupe pants cut
with a roomy break above same-color loafers looked like it could have
been shot for an Italian brand in the late 1980s. It turns out that the
model wearing the look was in fact Lorenzo’s assistant, Dakota Raine,
and only appeared here thanks to another curiosity in casting. “I’m with
her every day, day to day,” said Lorenzo: “and she does a lot of fit
modeling for us. And actually on the day of this shoot we had three
[female] models on the set, but none of them gave me this emotion—this
Julia Roberts emotion—the way she did.”
This collection added a
fresh layer of construction to the foundation laid down last season.
Where Armani was softening the architecture of tailoring, Lorenzo is
adding its structure to the softness of sportswear. His boxy-shoulder
Chesterfield coats and long-skirted jackets recontextualize the more
recently emerged genre in daily dressing, rather than place them in some
reductive binary opposition. Jersey and cashmere pieces bearing
iconography from baseball’s Negro leagues point to a defunct
discriminatory division that should be neither repeated nor forgotten.
His insertion of the Ivy League’s defining shoe, the penny loafer—“Fear
of God’s first-ever hard-soled shoe”—against lushly realized militaria,
high-waisted chinos, and brashly lapeled pinstripe Yuppie jackets was
evidence of a collection that traveled far to arrive at a distinct
location. Teamed with the right script, director, and, of course, cast,
you could see these clothes playing a compelling part on screen (or
stream) in telling some new cinematic story.
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