Market Research:
Fear of God

It takes a while, I imagine, to force a luxury brand’s sensibilities, and a religion defined primarily by abnegation, to agree. Fear of God was never just a name—Lorenzo’s deep roots in the church are the brand’s intentionality, its spirit of abundance, its appearance of total self-control. Some of the pieces are still somewhat temperamental: the Fear of God v-neck “Negro Leagues” sweater, like everything else, is painstakingly well-made, but I still can’t figure out what I’m supposed to wear under it.

If astronomically high-end Americana is the goal, and it seems like it is, the diamond-cut swatch of excess fabric at the underarm feels like an inflection point. I am all legs and arms, and find it refreshing that the sweatshirt doesn’t slide up my torso as I raise my hands over my head, but crucially, I’m also not swimming in it. The ribbing at the cuffs and hem are made of a sturdy elastic that would stand up to a 100 high-heat washes, if you weren’t definitely going to dry clean it. It is Fear of God after all: it is a heavyweight sweatshirt in neutral oatmeal, the color of splitting logs and hitting the heavy bag at dawn on an empty stomach, but on the second look, the piece is dignified, scholarly, almost regal. It is an essential that I will scarcely feel fancy enough to wear. In the lookbook, it is styled over a hoodie, on top of lounge pants. The highs dipped into the low 70s in Los Angeles for the first time since early March last week; I don’t know when, if ever, it will be cold enough to pull that look off.

The sweater is part of a Negro League capsule that also includes a hat, a hoodie, and several other graphic designs. Baseball is part of the black American middle-class tradition, and according to most historians, was originally a church-sponsored activity: When I remove the sweater from its packaging, I’m reminded of pre and post-game prayers in youth league baseball against teams from neighboring churches, and New Era’s first heritage Negro League collection, which came out forever ago. I saved to buy the flannel Homestead Greys hat but then walked straight by Lids to spend the money at Gamestop once my mom drove me to the mall; she bought the hat for me anyway, because it was “a piece of my history.” Although there is a Greys fitted in the seventh collection lookbook; the capsule is an homage to Lorenzo’s grandfather Lorenzo Manuel, who pitched for the Atlanta Black Crackers.

Lorenzo’s father was also a manager in the majors, helming the Montreal Expos, Florida Marlins, Chicago White Sox, and New York Mets—Lorenzo himself tends to talk about fashion like it’s sports, because that’s what fashion is. Narrative, spectacle, and kayfabe. Indeed, much like how games of organized baseball between all-Black teams were being played long before they were the stuff of headlines, Fear of God has been around for a half-decade, trying, with varying levels of success, to add to the elevated basics cannon. There have been awkward longline curved hem tees and sleeveless rock flannels, but there have also been perfectly drape-y nylon bombers. The Fear of God aesthetic used to be more youthful and anarchic; the seventh collection, which has been written about as a breakthrough for the label, is framed against a sober, stone gray backdrop with all the models in transit or in repose, but always oozing a certain rectitude, a been-there-before poise. Now that Fear of God has crash-landed in the present with infinitely sensible new offerings, Lorenzo thinks it’s time to push for “Ralph Lauren heights.”

I think, the further I sink into Getty Images looking for outfit inspiration, that the 43-year-old designer is the best advertisement for his own clothes, whether that be a pair of basketball shorts and a jean trucker jacket, or track pants and an oversized tee. He could always be headed to or from the clubhouse, or on the way to a board meeting—although none of the outfits I’m describing are professional, they are workmanlike. There are actual YouTube tutorials on how to look like Lorenzo; often the YouTubers have teleological arguments for street style. Not just how you’ll look, but what you can accomplish in what you’re wearing. The best you can hope for when wearing Fear of God in 2020 is looking like Lorenzo at Paris Fashion Week— the uber-dignified version of the “business up top, TNT movie marathon down bottom” look that digital remote workers have been falling face first into since late March. It’s difficult to make such discord look anything other than slovenly or accidental, which makes the style of dressing, or anti-style, easy to skewer in snack food commercials—the fit, if you’re not going to embarrass yourself, must be just as important as the forethought. This is where Fear of God comes in. The lounge pants are subtle, comfortable, tailored black joggers with fine enough details to dress up or down; the blazer keeps up what fashion critic Robin Ghivan describes as “the guard rails of decorum.” The modern professional has to, for their sanity, create some division between the moments in the morning when their brain is replaced by their phone, “work,” and whenever they remember to eat, but personally, I’d like to be able to move fluidly between those things without putting too much effort into any of it.

In 2014, while doing press for Mad Max: Fury Road—a big-budget action film that presents a distant future where the Earth is gripped by environmental and refugee crises and things blow up constantly—Tom Hardy answered the phone for Esquire’s Tom Junod and spoke for eight wandering minutes about pants. “The world is just pants, isn't it?” Hardy in-between projects, was passing the time as I do now: growing his hair out, figuring out what was important to him, occasionally stumbling onto new systems of living. Hardy had adopted what I find to be a useful set of guiding principles: a man’s pants [really, a man’s anything] should be nice, fashionable, useful. Can I take out the trash, do the dishes, and “make a clean run for the border in them?”
Hardy couldn’t have known he was describing Fear of God, and the low-key luxury that the brand has been angling for all these years. If I wore these clothes to a fashion show I wouldn’t be out of place; I forget I have them on when I go to the corner store for wax paper and scouring pads and no one asks where I got them from. I have taken out the trash, fixed a floor moulding, and watched Manchester United lose in them. I might have made a run for the border in them too, but that seemed like a lot of work.

Micah Peters writes about all sorts of things, at The Ringer.