Mr Greg Dacyshyn has a glorious white Santa Claus beard that flows freely down his chest and, by his estimation, is barefoot 90 per cent of the time. “When I’m wearing visvim Christos, I consider myself dressed-up,” he says. It is morning in Santa Monica, the oceanside region of Los Angeles, where he resides. “We live a dream life out here.”

Dacyshyn operates Camp High, a clothing brand that specialises in cozy tie-dyed sweats and psychedelic screen-printed T-shirts. It’s the perfect uniform for said dream life. Launched in 2018, Camp High has a simple goal: “I’d like to think that everything we do makes your day a little better,” Dacyshyn says. “These are very happy pieces.”

What Dacyshyn has tapped into, however, is a new type of craftsmanship, something especially attuned to our current times. It’s that creative spirit that MR PORTER captures with our ART/CRAFT capsule, a collection of DIY-influenced items from fashion’s most creative minds.

Our brief to them was simple: indulge in your most expressive whims and create items that blend the lines between fashion and art. Viewed through LA’s sun-dappled prism, it’s a vision of artisanship worlds away from Savile Row tailors or the petite mains toiling away in some hoity-toity couture atelier. Yet it’s just as reliant on a pure and beautiful notion: people making things, with their hands, for other people to wear.

To wit: while Camp High’s designs themselves are undeniably blissed-out and welcoming, their best aspect may well be that they rely on a network of local makers to help cut, sew, dye, and print their wares. The Zen-master hypebeast Mr John Mayer caught on early, and during the pandemic, as the world retreated into their sweats and tie-dye, Camp High’s optimistic loungewear was downright prescient (and sold out quickly).

Compared to the thrumming, glistening machine that is New York’s fashion industry, or Europe’s generations-old workshops, the fashion scene in Los Angeles is a scrappier affair. It reflects the relaxed ethos of the sprawling metropolis, from its hazy coastal hamlets populated by Birkenstock- and baja-wearing beach bums to the mysterious homes perched along the hillside canyons.

Not only that but the way the city has welcomed artists on the fringe, who have made careers that are unexpected and deeply authentic, not to mention wildly inventive. (Think Messrs Ed Ruscha and Sterling Ruby, or Ms Catherine Opie, to name just a few.)

It’s in this milieu that a new breed of designer is making a home for themselves, and redefining what we consider craftsmanship. In fact, they’re pushing it into the realm of the art world, where expressing emotion and message is just as important as aesthetics.

There’s another Greg, Mr Greg Chait, of The Elder Statesman who, since 2007, has been making plush cashmere apparel and accessories in his own factories around LA, often dyed or knit by hand. Mr Josué Thomas, of Gallery Dept., rips up and rebuilds classic workwear staples – carpenter pants or jeans or trucker jackets – imbuing them with an urban jolt of energy that has led celebrities and musicians to flock to his label.

Then there’s the mother-and-daughter duo of Mses Ladan and Tania Shayan, behind the fine jewellery brand SHAY who turn precious raw materials into sleek and understated accessories that reflect the effortless local aesthetic. Meanwhile, Mr Reese Cooper, the young streetwear phenom, often uses existing or upcycled textiles to craft his outdoorsy apparel.

And in his downtown LA studio, Mr Greg Lauren (so many Gregs) creates hybridised pieces that can look like a mash-up of two garments, like a peacoat mixed with a denim jacket.

“For me, Los Angeles, and California, is absolutely where I found my voice,” says Lauren. “When I arrived in Los Angeles, I immediately sensed this independent spirit, one where as a creative you felt like you could make anything happen if you had the ideas and the drive. In many ways it’s about breaking the old rules and imagining new ways to do things.”

To that point, Lauren has quite literally taken the most traditional garments of the menswear canon and broken them down to their very essence, only to build them back up with a renewed sense of relevance. In their deconstructed look, one can read a commentary of how a new generation of designers is quite literally remaking past paradigms in their image. One can also see the shadows of history in their unfinished seams and upcycled textiles.

The human touch is, of course, the foundation of the fashion industry as a whole. After all, there was a time when you knew the person who made your clothes – in fact, you probably ordered it from them. But that sort of connection today perhaps best exists in these smaller brands, which depend on a community of people that they work with directly and are oftentimes friends as well as colleagues.

“A lot of human hands touch these pieces, in order to make them,” says Dacyshyn, who often works out of his backyard, using his Volkswagen van as a makeshift office when needs be. “Some people think you just turn on the sweatshirt machine and it just spits ’em out. But we really hand-make them here, down to sewing the tags on them. And I consider our vendors friends, we spend a lot of time with them. It’s cool to be the owner of a company and then you develop these intimate relationships with your vendors.”