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When J.Crew president and creative director Jenna Lyons tapped friends and family to model the wares of her Spring 2017 presentation last season, the fashion industry saw it as a refreshing, inclusive response to familiar casts. Tapping a mix of influencers and actual J.Crew team members, Lyons seemed to prove she was wildly in tune with buyers’ need for some authenticity and the next crop of faces. It’s a cultural aptitude she flexed yet again today by plucking Instagram comedians Lorenzo “Renny” Cromwell and Reggie Couz to model pieces from J.Crew's Heritage capsule collection.
Disarmingly stoic today, the comedian friends are better known to their millions of Instagram fans—of which they count Rihanna, Diddy, Drake, and yes, Jenna Lyons among them—for posting uproarious, confession-style videos to their respective accounts. To hear Lyons tell it, it was these videos—like the viral vignette of Cromwell and Couz battling in a sing-off—that had the J.Crew exec hooked. Showing her team at work their videos, she knew she wanted them for the presentation’s cast that also boasted comedy giant, Sandra Bernhard.
Cromwell and Couz confessed modeling was certainly a first for them, but joking it up with fans in between striking solid poses, it looked like the brand has a new pair of poster boys on their hands.