Between Ruin and Reinvention: Greg Lauren’s Destroyed Elegance
Sotheby’s spends a morning with the American artist-fashion designer whose remarkable creations take centre stage in the exhibition Ozymandias: Myths of the Near Future.
P ositioned meaningfully amidst the vast, sprawling timeline of human creativity at Sotheby’s Maison, Greg Lauren’s designs come to life amid ancient Greek and Egyptian sculptures, first edition books including Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, and contemporary art such as Urs Fischer's colossal sculpture Big Foot (2014). Like Percy Bysshe Shelley and J. G. Ballard, Lauren offers a beautifully disorienting mix of old and new, an electrifying “destroyed elegance” fuelled by a dizzying collision of eras and cultural codes. Flanked by treasures from the ancient past and visions of a post-apocalyptic future, Lauren’s garments feel profoundly at home.
Born the son of Ralph Lauren’s head of menswear design Jerry and the nephew of Ralph himself, Lauren seemed originally destined to retell the stories of “gods and heroes” handed down in his family. Afternoons spent watching TV at home saw the young Lauren being schooled in the art of the perfect suit, and observing the debonair self-made Hollywood icons who wore them — Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart. Years before Lauren even opened a book by the famed American novelist Ernest Hemingway, he had already learned that the man who went fishing wearing a collared shirt with cinched, wide leg chinos had immaculate style.
But Lauren would prove no passive observer of inherited style. “I was exposed to storytelling through clothing and building a world, not just a piece,” he reflects. "That was one of the beautiful things that I definitely learned from my uncle, this idea that collections began with a story, a world. It's just that, for me, I started to rely on a different set of ideas to create that world. It was more informed by the things that I loved — the comic books, the heroes from my generation. Early on, the character Mad Max was that storyline. I loved the idea of this hero who was surviving on things that he finds.”
An iconoclastic desire to dismantle and to subvert superficial façades of image and style would become emblematic of Lauren’s diverse oeuvre, fully embodied across painting, paper, and fabric. “As an emotional thing, I needed to deconstruct the heroes that I was exposed to in order to understand them and find my own,” he explains. “And as an artist, I had to do that for my own voice to emerge.”
Lauren had been fascinated since childhood by the idea of donning personas, and examining the suit both as armour and façade to the world became an artistic obsession. One of his best-known early series as a painter, Hero (2004), executed in brooding sepia, umber and ebony oil pigments on crumpled Japanese washi paper, rendered fatigued superheroes hunched over on their sofa or having coffee alone in a diner.
From around 2008, Lauren moved from canvas to sculpture, sewing a series of paper suits using the sewing machine gifted to him by his mother just before her passing. These Japanese washi kraft paper creations simulated a “sartorial pantheon” of 40 iconic menswear pieces — the three-piece peak lapel suit, the tuxedo, the white polo shirt, workmen’s boots, brogues, a motorcycle jacket, the padded gilet, the duffle coat, the hoodie, and even Superman’s cape. Exhibited at Lauren’s pivotal solo show Alteration in 2010 in Los Angeles, they materialised like Shelley’s ruins — ghostly apparitions of ivory white and graphite silver, meticulously creased and wrinkled to assert their unlikely presence.
Alteration represented a critical turning point, showcasing the fearless textile assemblages that would characterise Lauren's mature practice. Here, he spliced familiar clothing archetypes to challenge modern concepts of identity, assembling scraps of weathered, vintage materials to expose the contradictory roles garments play: heritage versus artifice, utility versus fragility, and protection versus revelation. This physical manipulation of cloth permanently redefined his medium; from that moment onward, Lauren recalled, “fabric became my paint, and the thread became my brushstrokes.”
Some of Lauren’s most famous pieces debuted at Alteration. The BLANKET/DUFFLE DICKENS jacket, an arresting silhouette of an anti-hero from the distant future, is a discordant mash-up of patina and texture, stitching together vintage military duffle bag fragments with fraying vintage military blankets, backpack straps swinging nonchalantly from the reverse.
A beautiful wool tailored jacket which accidentally shrank in the wash was the origin story of the OLIVER jacket, a playful reference to Charles Dickens’ orphaned hero Oliver Twist. Rather than discarding his creation, Lauren began intuitively adding pieces of fabric — a double cuff was stitched to the shrunken cuff, a faux vest attached to the widened lapels. Sometimes patinated with cast resin, silver plate and paint, they conjure up the glimmering mirage of Shelley’s traveller from an antique land.
These pieces were promptly bought up by Barneys, and Lauren would go on to release his first runway collection the following year.
“I had artistic questions about what clothing could mean, what it could say, what it could be, what rules could I break ... I want to redefine what a jacket can be. I want to redefine what tailoring could mean. I want to redefine what it can say. That's where I really felt like it was entering into the world of art.”
- Greg Lauren
Obsessed with improvising upon the traditional “riggings” of clothes-making taught by his father and uncle, Lauren found his answers by constructing garments as intricate “mosaics of all these small pieces, scraps, and fragments.” He began inventing an entirely new emotional vocabulary for clothing, co-opting the symbolic power of vintage uniforms into his visual storytelling. Lauren recalls one of his favourite childhood memories: visiting the Canal Street Army & Navy store with his mother. Sifting through beautifully faded army surplus, sailor shirts or Boy Scout uniforms — their heavy cotton patinated by a sheen over many years of service — taught him the weight of cultural symbols, offering a way to honour the individuals who had originally worn them.
For Lauren, true beauty is driven by imperfection, repair, and destruction. Within Ozymandias, traditional design paradigms are spliced like sartorial glitches in the fabric of time — serving as both critique and celebration of cultural history. This friction is masterfully embodied in the 50/50 PREP STRIPE/DENIM W/CREST jacket, an unexpected hybrid that grafts a preppy Ivy League rowing blazer onto a vintage denim trucker jacket. It stands adjacent to the BLANKET CHAMBRAY NOMAD, which poignantly pairs an ancestral vintage blanket with soft linen chambray and pearl-snap Western hardware. Nearby, the CHARCOAL TENT TAILS daringly subverts formal dress codes, rendering classic evening tails in rugged charcoal military tent canvas lined with delicate pinstriped silk faille.
A distinct fearlessness underlines Lauren’s creative practice — a consequence, perhaps, of the bittersweet moment his father told him to simply “do your own thing.” Studying art history at Princeton, Lauren found his earliest artistic heroes in the Renaissance masters, Rembrandt, and Caravaggio, whose technical brilliance was matched by a profound emotional depth. A subsequent infatuation with Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, and Jean-Michel Basquiat — the gritty titans of the New York art scene — convinced him that art must transcend mere technique or realism to express true “thoughts and feelings and emotions.”
This intellectual evolution culminated in his final-year thesis, The Failure of the Modern Movement and the Commercialisation of Modernism. In it, Lauren examined the sharp gulf between creative intent and hard-edged reality, arguing that while the radical creations of Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, and Le Corbusier became celebrated design icons, they ultimately failed to realise their utopian philosophical ideals, instead becoming sterile commercial status symbols.
“I believe that every creative person, every artist, should find the story that they are uniquely qualified to tell, and tell that story. Absolutely. Because if you do that, whatever it is, whether you're a writer, a filmmaker, a singer, whatever it is, no one can tell your story. They can do something like it, but no one can tell your story the way you can tell it.”
- Greg Lauren
Seeking a deeper, more significant human truth over commercial success, Lauren began ideating entirely new worlds through what had been discarded. Today, his work resists simple classification, occupying a fluid space between fashion, sculpture, costume, and fine art object. A prime example is an archival women’s sleeveless jacket from his Spring/Summer 2016 collection. Crafted from the weathered remains of a vintage military tent, the front incorporates rugged “Brando” motorcycle jacket detailing — evoking Marlon Brando’s rebellious style in The Wild One (1963). On its reverse, however, the garment sheds its traditional structure, unfolding into a dramatic arthropodic “spinal” pleated back that cascades to the ground.
“Can fashion do something different, not tell you or dictate who you should be, but can it actually magnify something that is within you?” Lauren asks. “Can it actually go from being this kind of armour that is a façade or an idea?”
In bringing Lauren’s works into conversation with myths old enough to be half-remembered and futures strange enough to feel inevitable, Ozymandias: Myths of the Near Future positions Lauren not simply as a designer of garments, but as an artist who remakes the very grammar of style. His “destroyed elegance” is at once critique and celebration: an insistence that both history and character live in wear, in patching, and in the deliberate refusal of polish. Ozymandias reveals Lauren as a true renaissance figure, at home across mediums, whose central proposition remains unchanged: that clothing, like art, should be a vessel for remarkable stories, shaped by the courage to alter inherited codes rather than merely repeat them.
