For the latest episode of the second season of his YouTube talk show, Kerwin Frost was joined by Fear of God founder Jerry Lorenzo for a wide-ranging discussion encompassing nearly 90 straight minutes of creative insight.
Early into the interview, Lorenzo reflected on the first time he met fellow multi-hyphenate Kanye West and how that meeting instilled a very specific type of confidence in him regarding his vision for FoG’s future.
“I had launched Fear of God and we just dropped our lookbook and this video and shortly after that, Virgil [Abloh] and Ibn [Jasper] came by my apartment,” Lorenzo said about 12 minutes into the video up top when asked to tell the story of how he got involved with West’s APC line. “He was launching Pyrex at the same time and I was like, ‘Yo I’m launching this brand’ and I showed him these flannels with the zippers on it and these long tees and he’s like, ‘Yo, I need these long tees’ and he just took them out of my garage.”
A couple of weeks later, Lorenzo learned that Abloh had given a couple of those shirts to West, who was soon set for a show in Atlantic City at the time.
“I got a random call from Virgil like ‘Yo, can you be in Atlantic City Tomorrow?’” Lorenzo said. “I was like, ‘Uhhh’ and he was like, ‘Ye wants to see this Fear of God collection that you did.”
Once Lorenzo arrived, he started showing West the collection and explaining his vision.
“But before I could get through explaining everything, he’s holding up this t-shirt and he’s like, ‘Man, I can see all the thought that went into this’ and it was at that moment that I knew that we saw things the same way,” he said. “And I felt that from looking at him from afar, obviously, but then when we connected personally I was like, yeah, we kinda see things the same way.”
West then invited Lorenzo to join him in Paris for APC work, an experience which Lorenzo recalled included him learning how to do his own stuff while simultaneously trying to help West bring his vision to life. Asked to further detail the impact these early experiences with West affected his FoG trajectory, Lorenzo explained that it reaffirmed the importance of what he felt was the unique importance of the brand’s aim.
“I knew they were looking for this plane to be landed perfectly in this t-shirt thing,” he told Frost. “I had this weird conviction that I didn’t know where it came from and then this individual that I had looked up to so highly felt the same way about it and then, yeah, it did just kind of give me that confidence that what I’m proposing might be missing.”
Later on in the interview, Lorenzo went deep on the potential behind his recently announced Adidas partnership, which is said to be built on the larger goal of reimagining the future of Adidas’ basketball division. Lorenzo also detailed the differences with regards to the personal importance of his work with Nike and Adidas.
“I think it just happened in a divine way,” Lorenzo, who didn’t disclose launch specifics, said. “It’s like, growing up as a kid, Nike was, like, the aspiration … It was all the guys that I looked up to and products that I looked up to. So the Nike opportunity was really me fulfilling a kid’s dream. Fast forward to now, early 40s, the Adidas opportunity is, like, I feel like it’s a god dream for the future.”
As always, the full Kerwin Frost talk is indeed worth your time. Catch it up top via YouTube.
