It depends what you want out of fashion. Something usefully good-looking, and that’s that? Or something that signals meaning? Well, Craig Green, newly crowned British menswear designer of the year, is certainly in the second camp. His show today was one of London’s poignantly symbolic creative responses to the omnipresent atmosphere of dread that bedevils our days. Either you attempt to elude it by escaping into fantasy—like Charles Jeffrey’s Loverboy performance earlier in the day—or you face the fear, like Green. “It’s like being scared of something, which is massive weight. Fear of the unknown,” he said. One of Green’s fears is the vastness of the sea. His men and boys were mariners and submariners, sou’westered, uniformed, and sunk in some terrifying end-of-the-world battle for survival.
Now, that may sound too dramatic—depths that aren’t apparent if you look at the pictures. Green’s narrative is a continuum from one season to the next. It’s allusive, not literal, always signaling emotional stuff about the plight of masculine identity—aggression versus sensitivity, spirituality versus utilitarianism. His way of abstracting military and religious clothing into planes, his trailing ties, is well known. And all present here again, only this time laden with far more of a sense of foreboding.
There was an army of single-color cotton drawstring sailor’s smocks with hoods and wide pants—navy or brownish violet. There were fragmented elements of Eisenhower jackets, tied with tubular belts that Green described as “like oxygen tubes,” slightly suffocating felted and quilted materials. It did set the imagination flailing for explanations. Might the guys at the end, with their padded hoods and their big metal- latched buttons, be the lonely occupants of a bunker or the crew of a nuclear sub, facing the inevitable? Was there some last prayer hallucinations of priests in church-carpet robes being sent up here? Well, if you like. It was fashion not waving, but drowning, but bravely done all the same.
