Naturally gifted fashion designers often tend to craft garments as a form of autobiography. Angelo Urrutia is such a designer, and his gift is double. For as well as having an instinctive and long-practiced facility for clothing creation, he is also possessed with the raw material of a richly interesting life experience and perspective. El Salvador born, Queens raised, and often on the move, Urrutia has a roving sensibility that encompasses multiple American fashion traditions, niches, and subsets. He is also a materials cognoscente—just don’t get him started on printed deerskin—who haunts multiple specialist mills and factories in the heartlands of European and Japanese craft.
This (shamefully late-reviewed) fall 4S collection contained many conventionally contradictory elements that were reconciled through design into innovatively harmonic outfits. Blended references from influences including Norma Kamali, Matsuda, Betsey Johnson, and Perry Ellis, and on occasion Chanel, were combined with the intricate fruits of those fabrication safaris to upend—or at least destabilize—the inherently self-identifying norms of menswear.
On his cast of fellow industry cognoscenti (including one much-loved ex-member of the Vogue Runway team) Urrutia’s tufted bouclé work shirts, feather-edged topcoats or side-slashed hoodies, cropped weathered-leather bombers and liner jackets, marcella weave fleeces, and croc-print pants instead emanated a much more eclectically interesting notion of worn “masculinity.” While sometimes swashbucklingly disordered at first sight, each non-uniform uniform was in fact a meticulously thought-through work of desegregation between categories and codes that blended Urrutia’s path and passions. If New York had the menswear runway platform it merits then 4S would surely be a rapidly rising force there: fine as the lookbook was, this collection deserved a show.
