Welcome to Los Feliz: Jerry Lorenzo on His New Birkenstock Collab and a Fear Of God Milestone

Jerry, hello: what’s going on?

A lot, man! I’m excited that ’23 is finally here. We’ve got a bunch of projects that we have been working on that are finally going to see the light of day. The first is with Birkenstock, that’s going to hit the world this month, and we are excited about that. It’s taken about two years of working in development with the Birkenstock team to land the product.

Your brand has been growing phenomenally: I see Essentials especially everywhere in London and Milan and my friends in retail report it goes out the door as soon as it arrives…

Essentials has become what the intention of it was to become. And that’s very humbling, I would say in this case that intention was accessible aspiration. I wouldn’t say it is a diffusion, because we wanted to provide wardrobe solutions at an accessible price point where you didn’t feel like you were getting something that was watered down.

What’s also impressive is that you’ve taken the word ‘essential’, which is as much a synonym for “vital” as it can be one for “basic,” and made it fashion-synonymous, as you say, with democratic aspiration.

We’re always trying to create a product that’s rooted in function and necessity. We place our aesthetic point of view against that, but we keep it honest. This was also the intention of our last collection, Eternal: creating the tailoring to provide the freedom for our consumer to step into something a little bit more elegant, a little bit more sophisticated, but which stayed within the proportions of their casual clothing.