The story behind Craig Green’s extraordinary ‘jigsaw puzzle’ leather jackets

This past June, marking a return to the runway after a two-year hiatus, the celebrated British designer Craig Green invited 120 attendees to his studio in London’s Docklands to view his S/S 2025 collection. The trappings of the space – which he describes as being divided between an artistic workshop and a clothing atelier – had been momentarily hidden away and a snaking white runway painted along the floor of the former Carlsberg-Tetley Brewery. ‘It’s like someone painting a runway through your house,’ he said at the time.

Speaking from that same studio, some months later, Green smiles at the memory. ‘It felt... honest,’ he considers. ‘A lot of the time when we do the show most of the team members haven’t even seen the venue. I think working here until the moment that we showed had a nice feeling to it; a different feeling to what we have done in the past. It’s very much a “making” studio, so I wanted there to be a craft element [to the collection]; to show the reality of where these things were made.’

ECCO.kollektive x Craig Green’s ‘monumental’ leather jackets

But he also admits that the intimacy of the showcase reflected the personal nature of the collection, which mused on the idea of ‘sons and fathers’ (Green’s own father had passed away six months prior to the show). ‘I guess you have ideas of what your father will be, and your father has ideas of what you’ll be,’ he described at the time. ‘It’s not so much a memorial to him, but more thinking about the relationships between sons and fathers.’ The idea of family linked to him seeing his studio as a home, of sorts: ‘I think most people spend more time with the people they work with than anybody else. So in a way, this place is like our home.’

These ideas seemed to culminate in the show’s most memorable pieces: a series of ‘biker jackets’ constructed from stitched-together protective leather patches in an intricate, jigsaw puzzle-like collage (the garment was featured as a winner of a 2025 Wallpaper* Design Award, and has been ubiquitous in magazine editorial shoots this season). A little like a Rorschach test in clothing form, Green says that their amalgam of elements recalls several things at once: biker jackets, yes, but also rollerblading kneepads, hunting jackets, martial arts uniforms, factory wear, even the Meccano-like blocks of a children’s toy.

'I was thinking about how as a kid you wanted to take things apart, like an old television, unscrewing old electricals and seeing what was inside. This collection was about that – about pulling something apart and reconstructing it,’ he explains. It was an act he linked with the collection’s theme: a kind of fantasy of a father and son bonding, which was also reflected in the childlike motifs of tractors and lorries which adorned handkerchief-like tabard tops. ‘It’s not like me and my dad ever did these things,’ he smiles. ‘We didn't have that relationship at all. But it was more about exploring this idea of a father-son relationship.’

The garments, which took over five months to complete, were made possible through a collaboration with ECCO.kollektive, a recent arm of the Danish leather tannery which sees it collaborate with designers on limited-edition capsule collections in ECCO leather (previous iterations have included partnerships with Kiko Kostadinov, Natacha Ramsay-Levi and Peter Do, among others). The pieces were an act of true collaboration: beginning in the Craig Green studio, the designer would then travel to the ECCO atelier in the Netherlands every two or three weeks.

‘We started in the ECCO archive of accessories: they have the most amazing collection,’ he explains. ‘From there we took some of the pieces – these really quite specialist pieces – and started building them up as a team. It was like a jigsaw puzzle.’ The construction demonstrates the leathercraft of the ECCO atelier: pieces are hand-painted along their edges, are padded or quilted, or finished with top-stitched detailing. ‘Every single element is hand-cut, from different types and weights of leather. It was such an ambitious thing to construct – I think there might have been points when they were cursing my name,’ he smiles. ‘But it developed and grew, which is the way we like to work.’

Alongside the ‘monumental, articulated’ jackets, Green also reworked a version of ECCO’s ‘Joke’ shoe, a derby lace-up, from the 1980s, reimagined with a hefty sole and moccasin-style detailing in lace-up and pull-on boot versions. ‘I think this collaboration came out so well because we working so closely with the people who were physically making it – the people who were making the patterns, the people sewing it, the people constructing it,’ he says. ’ That’s the thing I love about the process of making garments, of fashion. I love to see what’s possible.’

ECCO.kollektive x Craig Green is available at selected stockists worldwide, including Ssense.

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