With Craig Green, we’re looking into the soul of a man. The symbolic language he speaks through his clothes has gently pried open a spiritual portal, a ceremonial outlet for touching on emotions and existential longings which can move modern men to tears. Green described the impulses and tensions that were running through his mind while he was designing this season. “It really started with thinking about utopia and escape, asking what paradise would be,” he said. “But then it got darker.”
Who can escape? By painful coincidence, Green’s show was held in high-vaulted Victorian railway arches not half a mile away from the still closed-off crime scene of Borough Market. The burdens of current reality are all around us, within and without. In Green’s world, they’re manifested in the psychic effort to rise above it, to attain some kind of code of masculine dignity—but then, too, to armor and protect oneself. Some of his brotherhood were carrying strange structures made of wood, stretch jersey fabric, and tasseled ropes, a continuation of the abstract narrative he began in his graduation show from Central Saint Martins MA.
Half of the absorption in watching his show was keeping an eye on how fantastically well Green is developing his idiosyncratic techniques, both artistically and commercially. There were torso-defining draped and knotted T-shirts, pulled tight with drawstrings. The grommeted portholes he used as purely abstract devices in previous shows are now simple-but-sexy identifiers in his line of denim.
By the end, the paradise thread blossomed into brilliantly colored oversize collages of palm trees, beach scenes, and a parrot, printed onto blanket wraps, cagoules, and outsize scarves. Green described the fabrication, laughingly, as “like beach mats.” They were outstanding and uplifting, a career landmark which confirms Craig Green as the equal of any menswear designer in Paris, Milan, or elsewhere. Out of these dark times, this complex, sensitive talent shines.
