Craig Green's 50-Year-Old Eco-Dyed Shoes Are Literally a Joke (EXCLUSIVE)
British designer Craig Green has a keen eye for experimental fashion that reimagines menswear through reconstructed, often padded, materials that reshape classic silhouettes into all-new forms.
He's also really good at finding collaborators who enhance his distinctive vision.
Green’s link-up with ECCO.kollective, the high-end line of the 60+-year-old Danish footwear company, personifies this knack, and it makes sense on both a creative and technical level.
Green’s ECCO shoe collaboration debuted during his Spring/Summer 2025 presentation. At face value, the muted lace-up moccasins and slip-on boots, available at Dover Street Market, simply reinterpret ECCO's Joke shoe, a throwback silhouette popular in ‘80s Britain right around the time that Green was born.
"ECCO's approach to functionality and leather innovation is something I find really inspiring," Green tells Highsnobiety.
The collaboration felt like a "natural fit," he says, since the pair share a similar shoe design dogma: "We both explore craftsmanship in ways that push materials to new extremes."
But despite their muted color palette and unassuming silhouette, there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to Green’s ECCO moccasins.
These shoes are the first to ever utilize ECCO's “Super Critical CO2” dying technique, a new process that reportedly reduces the chemicals and water consumed by conventional leather dyeing.
It’s appropriate that Green, the avant menswear designer, is the first to bring Ecco's innovative dyes to market, though the method is still being developed and perfected. As such, the final product didn’t come out exactly as expected. Still, this unpredictability, Green says, is a part of the fun.
The "dye technique allowed for a level of depth and accidental color outcome that was almost impossible to plan,” he explains. “But that is the beauty of this process."
