Greg Lauren is an artist. Maybe you could tell from his last name that he's also Ralph Lauren's nephew, son of Jerry Lauren, VP of men's design at Polo Ralph Lauren. He grew up in the Lauren family, spent his younger years rummaging through flea markets for vintage fabrics and idolized the American men that his uncle looks to for inspiration. He spent time as an actor, then as an artist. Now, he's a clothing designer, assuming you felt the need to boil down what he does into a single occupation.
It's too easy to think that Greg is simply the product of the legendary fashion family that has defined American style for the better part of the last 50 years. But when you look a Greg Lauren creation, the name falls by the wayside. What you're looking at is nothing like what his surname might imply. His upbringing blends with a unique sense of surgical, and sometimes tattered, construction. The Polo horse is nowhere to be found.
To understand Greg's clothing you must understand not only his formative years idolizing the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Cary Grant, but his personal means of expression. See, Greg saw those legendary actors for more than their acting chops. They weren't just silver screen stars. "Men were aspiring to be all these iconic, heroic figures in all walks of life and were defined by their style, not their accomplishment," he says. "There was an imaginary place where all these guys all hung out and compared notes about their clothing. I saw Ernest Hemingway embodying this spirit before I read his novels. I knew him for what he stood for."
As many times as you've seen Steve McQueen on your Tumblr dashboard, few people connect with the idea of heroes as closely as Greg does. His work as a painter took things further, depicting the likes of Batman off the clock, sitting in a diner, run ragged and sipping a cup of coffee. "I had the burning desire and the need to explore my relationship to persona," he says. "I'd so much been associated with my last name, my family. This is what all my artwork was about: trying to peel away the layers and figure out who I am." These depictions of heroism or perfection—outward-facing facades that often hide personality and flaws—don’t interest Greg. His clothing dives deeper into that exploration with an ethos he dubs "imperfection as beauty."
For his installation in 2009 entitled "Alteration," he taught himself to sew delicate toile paper into classic menswear silhouettes. An army of ghost white mannequins clad in menswear staples made of delicate paper is a pretty clear metaphor, isn't it? It was tough going. When a detail didn't work out how he wanted, he would remove it and try again until it attached perfectly. He crafted duffel coats, blazers, parkas, moto jackets and even a three-piece suit that featured a strait jacket back panel. "Whatever I could find to sew, I turned into a jacket," he says. "I realized that the imperfections of the pieces became beautiful. What was amazing was how much that same idea resonated with so many people. Young and old. They were upset when they couldn't wear the paper stuff." At a later exhibition, he covered the walls of a museum with clothing details from pocket flaps to metal grommets, turning it into a sort of fashion insane asylum.
Clothing had always influenced Greg's art, so he took the steps to make sure people could actually wear his creations and started his eponymous line in Spring 2011, first with a few styles of jackets. The jacket, in his mind, is the coup de grace of any outfit. "Everything starts with the jacket," he says. "The jacket is the last thing that men or women, that is ultimately the piece that defines what we want to say about ourselves that day. No matter what else you have on, if ten guys are wearing the same jeans and T-shirt, and one puts on a jacket, that says something totally different." Greg translated his meticulous paper sewing methods to vintage fabrics he sourced from flea markets around the country and got to work turning art into fashion.
As an artist making clothing, if I can't affect the way people feel, then I'm not interested in doing it.
The operation has remained tightly knit over its four years. The first season of production proved a daunting task—turn his one-of-a-kind creations into more widely available clothing—so Greg recruited a few experienced cutters and sewers to essentially become proteges. "What I needed was someone who understood that that how we construct the pieces has to be impeccable," he explains. "Just because something is hanging halfway off the side or asymmetrical because it's torn doesn't mean that the side seam doesn't have to be perfect."
Greg touches everything, occasionally going so far as to tear apart a near complete piece to throw a patch over a rust stain or fill a small gap to add visual interest. He admits his studio looks like a tornado or two has run through it. Piles of vintage fabrics occupy shelves and stack up on one another as he and his crew sort through them in search of the perfect piece, sometimes as simple as a metal grommet, which he affectionately calls a "treasure." The entire process is very painterly and almost haphazard from an outsider's point of view—expert level paint by numbers, so to speak. While Greg admits it's not the most efficient model in the world, it works for him.
"We don’t need another clothing company on the planet, stylistically or environmentally," he says. "We have too much as it is. As an artist making clothing, if I can't affect the way people feel, then I'm not interested in doing it. I love that from a business standpoint, unknowingly what we do is very green because I have a 'no scrap' left behind policy." That ingrained inefficiency keeps the company at a manageable size even as what started as a 400 piece order of jackets its first season has grown to over 2,500 piece orders of a full-blown collection to 50 retailers around the world. It also allows Greg to stay involved with entertainment, not as an actor, but as designer crafting custom wardrobe outfits for actors and musicians, like Kanye West at the Grammys and Shailene Woodley in Insurgent.
And many of Greg's looks feel like they stepped out of a movie and onto a clothing rack. Some may even liken them to the familiar fashion movie concept Derelicte from Zoolander as the Greg Lauren look is inherently distressed and damaged, close to the dreaded "homeless chic" trend Fashion has become so notorious for. But he shrugs off the label. "I can't control what they see, right?" he says. "I will never make something that has a destroyed aesthetic just to make something that has a destroyed aesthetic. That's not the way I design. But we've done some amazing destroyed and repaired velvet or cashmere because I have a desire to ask why these materials mean so much."
His recent F/W 15 collection is filled with mismatched and destroyed pieces assembled and styled with elegance, like a tough denim stitched together with formal charcoal pinstripe wool. Taking such ritzy fabrics and turning them into something you might not first describe as luxurious is Greg's formula typified.
Looking back on the path that has taken him through so many different routes, it's only fitting that Greg went out to try something new at the behest of his father, only to return to fashion. "It's the most ironic and inevitable thing," he says. "I took this long journey to get back to something that is maybe what I was always meant to be doing." It may not be perfect, but it is beautiful.
