Meet Greg Lauren: the designer who turns army tents and wartime blankets into wearable art

He began exploring his personal style through art; in 2009, he staged an exhibition in New York called Alteration, for which he constructed suits from Japanese washi paper—wrinkled and crumpled to achieve a weathered quality. This fascination with the worn and the storied carried through to the launch of his namesake brand in 2011; vintage fabrics—including army tents, deadstock textiles and time-worn suits—became central to his practice.

“A vintage garment has a soul—a story of something and someone that came before,” he says. “I was interested not just in inheriting that story, but in deconstructing it and building it into something new, so that a new chapter can be written.” The exhibition brought together around 50 of Lauren’s pieces from the past decade. Among them is the Duffle Bag jacket, a piece he has been developing since he launched his brand. One such piece on display is constructed from a Second World War duffel bag, a military tent and fragments of old blankets. It preserves many of the original bag’s details, including the straps, which are re-attached to the back of the finished piece.

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Next to the jacket hung a photograph: Hattusa Hieroglyphs (2011), by New York-based photographer Domingo Milella, captures an 8.5-metre, 11-line hieroglyphic inscription found in what is now Türkiye—a marking that once declared the dominion of the Hittite Empire’s imperial capital (1600–1200 BCE), now worn by centuries of exposure into near illegibility. Lauren describes it as “a geology of slow erosion; a study in the beauty of imperfection”. The weathered rock is a natural counterpart to his own practice: both the photograph and the garment carry traces of a specific moment in history, their character shaped by the passage of time.

The exhibition also featured a range of first editions, including Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, an inspiration behind Lauren’s style. “I learnt to dress like Cary Grant but felt more like Oliver Twist,” says Lauren, whose destructed designs have been worn by some of Hollywood’s more fashion-forward individuals, among them Pedro Pascal and Chris Hemsworth. One of the most enduring novels of the 19th century, Oliver Twist follows its orphaned protagonist through the hardships of the workhouse and the precarious margins of Victorian society. In its most celebrated adaptations—the 1968 British musical film Oliver! and the 2005 movie remake—Twist’s clothing plays an important part of the storytelling: shirts frayed at the edges, drained of colour and grown loose in shape, are powerful motifs for his transient lifestyle.

That aesthetic runs through much of Lauren’s work, perhaps most pointedly in a design named after the Dickens character himself—the Oliver jacket. Built on the silhouette of the upper body elements of a classic three- piece suit, it is worked in varying degrees of crease and fade, the waist cinched and the front dressed with faux waistcoat panels. The design was, in Lauren’s own words, a beautiful mistake: “It started with the first jacket I ever made in wool—I had pre-washed the fabric, as I often did, but this time the garment shrank so much that it no longer closed at the front,” he recalls. “I thought to myself: what if I attached what looked like the front of a [waistcoat] to fill it out?” Lauren takes pride in such a process that unfolds on its own terms. “It speaks to what it means to make clothing as an artist—you create something and then you have to let it go. If you try to control what becomes of it, it takes away from the art.” 

Each of the archetypes he returns to—the three-piece suit, the work jacket, the baseball jersey— arrives with its own set of built-in assumptions: who wears it, in what context and what it communicates about them. Through his distressing processes, he wears those assumptions away along with the fabric itself, so that a weathered three-piece suit no longer straightforwardly reads as authority or wealth but becomes something altogether more ambiguous—and more personal. 

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“I do not want to tell someone who they should be or how they should dress—there is far too much of that,” he says. His work quietly sidesteps the familiar machinery of the fashion calendar—the logos, the trend-driven colour palette, the relentless turnover of seasonal themes—in favour of examining something as unassuming as an old cardigan pulled from the back of someone’s wardrobe, probably slightly shrunk from too many washes. The emotional weight that such a lived garment carries, Lauren believes, is something design alone could not replicate.

“Those imperfections eventually become part of the intended process,” he says. “I believe garments have the potential to elicit feelings, answer questions, be thought-provoking—and look really great at the same time. For me, the work itself is the art.”

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