Greg Lauren Wants To Change Menswear One Distressed Jacket At A Time

The day after his Fall-Winter 2016 Fashion Week presentation, Greg Lauren is feeling good. We’re walking through his temporary studio here in New York, an airy space with a coffee bar, and Lauren’s got a post-show buzz, the edges sanded down by his slightly unnerving Angeleno calm. He grew up here, on the Upper East Side—maybe you know his Uncle Ralph?—but he’s spent his adult life based in Los Angeles. He worked as an artist for a while and then, in 2011, returned to his ancestral calling: designing exceedingly handsome and terrifically expensive clothes.

Let’s be clear, though: Lauren’s clothes are more Mad Max than Polo. Military tents refashioned into coats, flannel shirts with snipped-off hems, Henleys that feel a century old—Greg Lauren garments exist somewhere between the past and the future, simultaneously beaten to death and precious to the touch. His show the previous night captured all this—little pods of models in a cavernous space, each group dressed in a different facet of the GL wardrobe: Pinstriped dandies held court next to post-apocalyptic miners, and very beautiful boxers took turns shadow-sparring in a ring erected in the center. Read more at GQ.