The goal of achieving spiritual transcendence is running rife through the menswear community. It’s becoming quite normal dinner conversation among the traveling fraternity of showgoers to compare notes on their daily stress and social media–combatting meditation practices, and that makes them particularly open to, even adoring of, what Craig Green has to say. He’s always been a pioneer explorer of masculine emotional and psychological longings and contradictions in the fraught modern world, and his show in the Boboli Gardens in Florence tonight handed his audience, well, the possibility that angels may walk among us, if only we could see them in the darkness. “Sometimes, the scariest thing you can think of is reality,” he said. “And sometimes the best thing you can think of is something you don’t know, like an afterlife or a heaven.”
Jump to his second look out, a boy in a pale pink sleeveless top and loose trousers, decorated with orange cords. He carried a neoprene outline of a man on his back—a silhouette that could suggest a guardian angel. The clothes at this stage, though, were of the straightforward, utilitarian, easy-wear type—Green’s province—despite the pastel shades and cordage. “I’d been looking at cleaners, surgeons, and postmen. They’re the people who have your life in their hands. There was that forgotten savior idea. I liked the idea that people could become angels in their lives by working hard and doing good,” he explained. Later on, the imprints of a nurse’s and a care worker’s aprons were set into ordinary shirts.
Green’s specialness is being able to express complexity and grounded simplicity at the same time. And fear. The angel silhouettes might also signify the chalked outlines of a crime scene. “There’s that dark idea, as well,” he said. “I always found it interesting that when 10 people are asked to give witness statements, they all say something different.”
Green has his signature codes. The details of ropes; vestiges of flags; the corded surface technique; his terrific roomy ankle-length parkas and raincoats—all these are the big sellers that you see fans of several generations sporting around the shows. From the viewpoint of innovation, there was extra seaming, left to create flanges on some pieces. A multicolored knitwear section transpired to be “our first collaboration,” Green said. “We worked with Nike; it’s their Flyknit sneaker fabric, which we made into clothes.”
And then there was his purely transcendent, conceptual finale: blurry, multicolored, neo-trippy prints, on blankets lashed together by ropes. “I thought they looked like a portal, a doorway, an escape to a better place,” said Green. He may be a normal-looking boy from North London, but no doubt about it, this Craig Green is a cult leader channeling a zeitgeist.