There’s something strangely English about what Craig Green does. The focus on craftsmanship. The storytelling. The practicality embedded into the garments. Even the name of his barely three-year-old label has a steadfast, stolid, even stoic quality. Alright, it’s Green’s own name, but it doesn’t make it any less worthy of analysis. And as London’s Spring 2017 menswear shows are choked by the traffic and road blockages caused by Queen Elizabeth’s 90th birthday celebration (the “Official” one, rather than her actual birthdate), it was difficult to look at Green’s latest collection and not see a reflection of Great Britain.
Or, maybe, not. Craig Green’s clothes are open to interpretation and extrapolation; when Green himself talks about them, he generally references wide and bold. This time, he talked about flags, about garments flapping like tarpaulins around the body, about saturated colors strung like bright bunting, and a draped number that reminded him of the white fabric of surrender. “The whole collection was initially based around a Scout scarf,” he said backstage. “That symbolism of ‘belonging’ to something.” He frequently mentioned the word “romantic,” and the notion of the whole thing feeling impulsive. As ever, you were encouraged to weave your own story into what Green did.
From a nuts and bolts perspective, Green shifted his collection on considerably from last season, and, indeed, the seasons before, as he explored complex color and pattern and intricate construction methods. This collection marked something of a turning point. Well it might. Earlier this year, he received the GQ Fashion Fund prize, a grant of more than $200,000 enabling him to propel his business to the next level. Green’s garments have always been superlatively made, but this time, there was a new variety to them. His trademark brief workman’s jackets came quilted and laced, in Moorish hand-blocked prints; there were hooded anoraks, and stand-out papery trench coats snaked with eyelets and ties.
If there’s a limit to what Green does, thus far it’s technical. His proposition overall strikes you as waist-up—jackets, coats, intriguing hybrids between the two. By contrast, Green’s wide-legged pants, stitched and laced and often left flailing, may have been instrumental in broadening the hemlines of tailoring across the board, but it’s difficult to imagine men wearing them in real life. Clever, then, to broaden that top-heavy offering, and play to his strengths.
But back to Green’s peculiar Britishness, which felt like a throbbing heartbeat behind the whole thing. The collection seemed fixated on the vernacular of everyday dress, for one, the hardy garb of quilted jackets, double-breasted blazers, and those handsome deconstructed coats, as well as hoodies—the new uniform, of a new generation. Green has often professed a fascination with uniformity, and what could be more uniform than those often-archaic costumes of his home country? Of Baden-Powell’s color-coded scarf-wrapped Scouts, and the quilted garb of the county farmer? He even offered a bunch of trailing pinstripes, lappets of fabric flying loose, like pulled-apart reinterpretations of the garb of city gents.
“Challenging and reinterpreting the familiar” was, in fact, a notion Green proposed, to explain his approach. On the one hand, it’s easy to think of that as reflecting, once more, Great Britain, of a country mired in tried and tested traditions, archetypes and stereotypes. Yet, more significantly, it was the challenge to Green’s own formula, which is often magical, but has become undeniably familiar, that was the most refreshing.
It was wildly romantic. It felt wildly impulsive. And it was something to which you wished, desperately, to belong—to paraphrase William Blake, to those “Green,” and pleasant lands.
