What you see is not what you get at a Craig Green show—the impact is also in what you feel and what you hear. It’s how he can be simultaneously a “wearable” designer who has devised a plainly relatable workwear genre while being tuned into a soulful wavelength that stirs men up like no one else. Start with what he said at the end: “I was thinking of this man made of glass, and that idea doesn’t have to mean fragility. It can also mean strength.”
There was a soundtrack of overlapping choral chants, classical orchestral passages, and, at one point, a snatch of bagpipes: spiritually roaming aural effects to saturate the brain while trying to make out the layered codes embedded in his clothes. “There were lots of ideas about medieval tradition and craft as we went through it,” he said.
So much here is normal and plain seeming: matte fabrics, cross-body straps, and wrapped belts; things closely related to trenchcoats; double-breasted jackets and cargo pants. And so much seems to refer to religious clothing, the martial arts, and (when he really takes off on a tangent) things that suggest strange states of falling apart, or the loneliness of plastic-clad, hooded men trudging toward an apocalypse.
It’s to be supposed that’s why the poll of international retailers and editors voted Green the menswear designer of the year at last month’s Fashion Awards; though still so young, he left behind the “emerging” designation long ago. He’s the designer with the flag (he has often referred to flags) who has the power to lead men into a liminal territory where this stuff can be imagined and its ambiguity taken seriously. Thus, when the “glass men” finally appeared (if that’s what they literally represented) on his runway, they were wearing sheets of plastic—red, green, pink, blue—which were somehow ruched, bubbled, and smocked on the torso, as if treated to granny-knitting techniques. Not clothes, really, but translucent windows on feelings.
The menswear fraternity has a high threshold of tolerance for all of Green’s experiential dimensions, because he also makes clothes that sell. But then again, over the past few days, it has been the designers who use fashion to express sensitive, delicate feelings, and who astonish with unexpected technique, who have stood out. As the phase of generic sportswear retreats, something much more nuanced, exciting, and deep is being ushered in. Green is a leader who is taking us there.