4S Designs

4S Designs is a New York house, founded by Angelo Urrutia in the fall of 2019 and shown unofficially in Paris that January, weeks before the pandemic closed the calendar. The house styles its own name 4SDesigns. Urrutia was born in El Salvador. His father disappeared during the civil war when he was around three, and his mother took him and a cousin north, first to Texas as refugees and then to New York, where her sister was already living. He has said that growing up there is where clothes became serious: “clothing was your defense mechanism. It was like your armor.”

He never studied design. A friend introduced him to Nepenthes, the Japanese company that Engineered Garments sits inside, and he began on manufacturing and production. He stayed close to twenty years, moving across production, concept, and design, and worked alongside Daiki Suzuki. Part of that work was going out to find American makers and carry them back for a Japanese audience, including Amish manufacturers in Ohio whose goods were adapted for that market. It is an unusual education, and it accounts for the two things this house is most obviously good at: knowing how a garment is actually built, and knowing that an American shape can be read from outside America.

When Urrutia went out on his own he went to Italy to have the clothes made. Nearly everything is produced in Bologna, where his business partner is based, which puts the house inside Italian cloth and Italian factories while the garments themselves stay American in outline. That is the proposition, and it runs opposite to the familiar one. Not a European house borrowing American work clothing, but an American designer with twenty years of Japanese-American work clothing behind him, having it made in Italy.

He is direct about what he does not want the results to become. “I really hate the word luxury,” he told Highsnobiety. “If it’s precious, like a ‘luxury item,’ you don’t want to ruin it.” The same impatience runs through how he talks about men and their clothes: “You can’t take yourself seriously. I feel like so many men today are trapped in this idea that they can’t wear certain things.” What follows from that is a house working in ordinary categories, a shirt, a jacket, a trouser, treated as though the making were the entire point.

4S Designs at W Department

We selected this house for the distance between what the clothes look like and how they are made. From across a room they read as American sportswear, familiar outlines a person already knows how to wear and does not have to be taught. Up close they are Italian production, and that is where the interest sits. It is a house that rewards reading at close range rather than at a glance.

Urrutia’s twenty years at Engineered Garments are the shortest way to place him, and the two houses are worth reading against each other: one drawn in New York out of American work clothing seen from Japan and cut and sewn in the Garment District, the other drawn in New York and made in Bologna. The line back is real. The conclusions are not the same.

Santa Fe suits it. This is a town where people dress with intent and dress to be outdoors in the same morning, and clothing its designer would rather see worn hard than kept has an easy life here.

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Continue Exploring

• All 4S Designs. The house gathered in one place.
• Engineered Garments. Daiki Suzuki’s New York house, where Urrutia spent close to twenty years before this one.
• Coats and jackets. Outerwear across every house at W Department, which is where this one is most easily read against the others.
• Trousers. Read from the waist down, across the roster.
• Lemaire. Christophe Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran’s Paris house, also at W Department.
• Nigel Cabourn. A Newcastle house drawn out of a vintage archive of military and work clothing, reading its sources rather than reproducing them.
• KUON. Arata Fujiwara and Shinichiro Ishibashi’s Tokyo house, built on boro, the Japanese practice of patching worn indigo cotton until the repair becomes the cloth.
• Getting Dressed as a Creative Act. Our writing on dressing with intent, which is the argument Urrutia is making from the other end.
• How to Build a Wardrobe. On assembling a wardrobe slowly rather than seasonally.
• How We Look at Clothes. What we are reading for when we read a garment.
• The Fabric Care Guide. Cotton, wool, denim, and the rest, and what each of them wants from you.
• The Library. Our writing on the houses we carry, reports from Paris, and the monthly playlist.
• Visit W Department. 54½ Lincoln Avenue on The Plaza, open daily, 11 to 5.

Shop 4S Designs

Angelo Urrutia’s New York house, made in Bologna.