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 encyclopedia 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.
But maybe not for long. Urrutia found himself meditating on the color black for spring, a hue he rarely uses but was drawn to for its sense of mourning. It’s also the best color to show off silhouette rather than ornamentation. His materials are coarse cotton twill, nubbly tweeds, perforated leathers, and five ounce denim. But in black—and in .jpg images—you can focus on the tailored fronts of his coats and their gorgeous swing backs, the flat front shorts with draped back pockets, the short vests he designed with interior ribbons so they can be half-cinched for a breezy look somewhere between done and devilish.
Urrutia’s fair and expansive eye means he couldn’t only focus on draped black stuff, so there are also electric shocks of orange—100% cotton, water resistant—and a primary color motif inspired by the Olympic rings. His logo was intarsia’ed into knitwear in a scribbled graphic inspired by Karl Kani and for those truly looking to lounge he has a relief knit cardigan and shorts that spell out his brand name with tonal sequins.
His American fashion dream is also a global one. His late grandmother, who was from El Salvador, appears in a photo printed on cargo jackets, and his Central American heritage is reflected in jerga hoodies and an abstract bird pattern used for knits. Cavalry twill shackets are made in Italy with the same fabrics of “$6,000 custom Italian suits”; a floral pattern and its oversized buttons is inspired by Hawai’i. A delectable cardi-coat riffs on Chanel; another takes on traditional Turkish dolman sleeves. Who else casts such a wide net and comes back with such delicious treasures? Maybe that’s the best and most American thing about Urrutia’s venture: It defies simple description and is all the more beautiful for its chorus of inspirations and ideas.
