This September, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute will open its ambitious “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” exhibition. For a more immediate fix of Americana, try Angelo Urrutia’s spring 2022 4SDesigns collection. Urrutia is an encyclopaedia of fashion knowledge, and each of his garments comes with an appendix so thorough it could make even the mind of a James Joyce scholar reel.
Urrutia has to annotate each work shirt, tall tee, and carpenter short because his view of American style is one often overlooked by fashion’s entrenched power structures. When we met in person at the former Ecce! restaurant in TriBeCa, a space he set up as a sort of club-showroom hybrid, he explained how hard it is for him to position his collection in the crowded and ever-expanding menswear market. The laziest term to apply would be streetwear—“I knew it growing up simply as ‘urban’ and something shunned in fashion,” he wrote in a short statement sent to press and retailers. Taking the garments of his youth in New York and making them in the finest materials with an obsessive eye for detail is the premise of his brand. It’s like Savile Row for guys who hate suits—and that’s a very specific market.
