For a while there, the Don Draper suit was the suit archetype: closely tailored, slim-lapeled, with mandatory crisp white shirt, belt, and tie. These days, with our collective screws already a
bit loose, suiting is getting delightfully looser, roomier. Drapier, not Draper.
Take, for example, Seth Rogen, wearing Fear of God to last night’s premiere for the upcoming Hulu miniseries Pam & Tommy, in which the actor portrays Rand Gauthier, the mullet-sporting purveyor of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s ill-gotten sex tape. His concrete-gray suit, with its big ol’ peak lapel jacket, gentle power shoulder, and double-pleated pants, worn over a warm mock neck tee in more or less the exact shade as his salt-and-pepper scruff, was made to be worn with hands dug into pockets (as Rogen’s were). It’s sexy in the way that a ’90s Armani suit is sexy, with the slightest whiff of Southern California sleaze. Which, given the occasion, was kind of fitting.
For the uninitiated, Seth Rogen is a great dresser. As of late, and often thanks to the styling sister duo of Wendi and Nicole Ferreira, he’s become a prime walking example of how to do cool, semi-formal dressing: colorful velvet, easygoing corduroy, worn with a boot or sneaker instead a dress shoe. Speaking of, let’s not forget the weirdo shoe choice here: Fear of God’s California shoe, an almost sculptural slip-on crafted from, in the brand’s parlance, “100% closed-cell foam” rubber. Then again, it was only a matter of time until freaky mules really found their place on a red carpet.
All of this was born of precise calculation: Fear of God’s Jerry Lorenzo has long been in pursuit of the perfectly louche suit. While Rogen’s, from the brand’s recent seventh collection (named for “the number of completeness and perfection”), is unfussy in that it’s roomier than most suits on the market, it’s also fussy in that it’s a hard fit to get right. Last fall’s Met Gala teed this up: as GQ’s Rachel Tashjian wrote then, “Apologies to Savile Row, but it’s way harder to make a suit not fit in just the right way than it is to make one fit perfectly.”