Above a portrait of British fashion designer Craig Green, photographed by Jack Davison in 2018.
Introduction
In the world of avant-garde menswear, few names resonate as strongly as Craig Green. Since debuting his eponymous label in 2012, the London-born designer has earned acclaim for his sculptural silhouettes, utilitarian inspirations, and innovative approach to uniforms. Among his standout creations, the Craig Green Buckle Down Jacket (officially Latch Down Jacket) has become one of the most recognizable and coveted pieces—an item that embodies both functionality and conceptual fashion.
What Is the Craig Green Buckle Down Jacket?
The Buckle Down Jacket is one of Craig Green’s signature outerwear designs, first introduced in his early collections and revisited in different iterations over the years. It’s characterized by:
-
Strap and buckle closures instead of traditional buttons or zippers.
-
Quilted construction that merges workwear practicality with high-fashion sensibility.
-
Boxy yet wearable silhouette, designed to blur the line between utility garment and statement piece.
The jacket’s straps can be tied, buckled, or left hanging—transforming it into a canvas for self-expression. This adaptability has helped it become a cult favorite among fashion insiders and collectors.
Green’s jacket is padded, sometimes quilted, sometimes puffy. It reads as armor while refusing hardness. The padding proposes a paradox: protection via softness. Instead of the medieval plate or the modern ceramic insert, you get a volume that absorbs rather than deflects. The jacket is a portable buffer—between shoulder and city, ribcage and winter, self and glare.
There’s a kindness embedded in that volume. It remembers blankets and duvets, the safety architectures of childhood. That memory complicates the usual codex of masculine protection, which is so often expressed as rigidity. Green places vulnerability on the outside and says: soft is also strong.
The utilitarian zeitgeist?
As for 2025, workwear and practical clothing is everywhere. This jacket can fit into this category, but there's a lot more to it.
The Buckle Down Jacket reflects these ideas through its adjustable straps, which can be read as both functional fastenings and symbolic bindings.
In fashion history, this piece stands alongside iconic outerwear like the Comme des Garçons biker jackets or Helmut Lang bombers, but with a distinctly 21st-century twist. It’s utilitarian yet emotional, a garment that sparks conversation.
The visible technology of care
Most outerwear hides its engineering—the taped seam, the thermal fill—like a magic trick. The Buckle Down Jacket externalizes some of it. Straps trace the body like exoskeletal ligaments; buckles sit where stress gathers. You can see how the jacket thinks. It’s a kind of wearable diagram, the technical drawing elevated to surface.
In that exposure there is a politics: care made legible. The garment says what it is doing for you—hugging, securing, warming—without embarrassment. That honesty feels humanist, even tender. In a culture of seamlessness, this is a refusal to disappear the labor of protection.
Fasten, breathe, step outside
The Buckle Down Jacket is often described as “statement outerwear.” The statement, if there is one, is modest and radical at once: protection can be soft; structure can be kind; masculinity can have hinges; getting dressed can be a small act of authorship. The buckles are not decoration. They are verbs, asking for your hand, offering you back your shape—less as an emblem of certainty than as a practice of care.
Fasten, breathe, step outside. The jacket doesn’t resolve the city; it equips you to meet it.