"Welcome to my world, where we tear fabrics apart": Greg Lauren on his approach to design and his conceptual collaboration with Moncler

Runway and utility are spliced together by Greg Lauren, himself a hybrid of fashion royalty and punk artist. 

Any piece of clothing that wanders into the presence of Greg Lauren should proceed with caution. That goes particularly for Moncler’s luxury nylon jackets, which the American artist and designer has targeted with some ferocity for Collide, his autumn/winter 2017 collaboration with the Swiss/French performance outerwear brand.

"When I got the first Moncler jacket I thought, this perfectly crafted shiny performance nylon is too perfect," says Lauren. "So welcome to my world, where we tear fabrics apart." 

Tearing apart to put back together in new form has been the conceptual artist’s approach to design since he started his eponymous label, in 2011. With a kind of Fagin’s gang street-urchin meets Johnny Depp on a heavy night out aesthetic, he creates clothing pieced together from aged traditional tailoring fabrics, military surplus or vintage workwear. And it is with this same sensibility that he tackled his capsule collection for Moncler.

A limited edition of approximately 200 unique garments – men’s, women’s and unisex – a combination of Moncler’s iconic pieces such as the padded jackets, reworked with Lauren’s signature use of repurposed fabrics in three colour ways: flame red and light blue, military green, and black, including a black down coat hybrid, cut in with an olive field jacket.

It’s an interesting approach to creativity that seems even more provocative when you consider Lauren’s personal history. Yes, he’s one of those Laurens, a scion of America’s first family of fashion. His uncle is Ralph, and his father, Jerry, has been Ralph’s creative director for menswear for more than 40 years.

"I grew up learning to understand why I should want to dress like Cary Grant or the Duke of Windsor, and the difference between a peak lapel and a notch lapel," says the 47-year-old, who has also been an actor – he appeared in Boogie Nights and The Wedding Planner and is married to the actor Elizabeth Berkley. "It was very useful. But I also equated that kind of dressing with a certain aspiration, something that was symbolic of privilege and upper class."

And so when it came to creating his own fashion label, he admits that he "rebelled against that background in an attempt to understand it. It’s a direct interrogation and exploration of things that I grew up with." From his teenage years onwards, Lauren collected vintage pieces at flea markets. "I lived in clothing that represented every male archetype," he says with a laugh. "I owned every motorcycle jacket that one person could have, and to this day I have still not been on a motorcycle." Eventually he taught himself to sew. "My first jacket was the result of many mistakes and sleeves on the wrong side. I took it apart and put it back together a dozen times to make it even remotely wearable, and it was still really terrible. But it was so imperfect that it was perfect and I wore it." He now shows his alternative Lauren approach on the catwalk at New York Fashion Week, and his label is carried by retailers such as Dover Street Market and Barneys.

With the Moncler pieces, the contrast between old and new is more striking still. "Something happens when you combine those army surplus pieces or vintage workwear with the high-performance technical materials that have now become synonymous with families walking down the street in Paris or New York," Lauren says. "I can’t quite explain it but it becomes more perfect, more crafted. I love deconstructing what we thought we knew so that we see it differently."

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