Computing exactly what makes Craig Green so excellent—getting your head around what you’ve just seen and why it makes people’s emotions go hyper—is a task fresh to many members of the international menswear confraternity in Paris. The reaction to Green bringing his show here from London for the first time confirmed everything that we in our hometown know about the designer. His coded devices are unfathomable, his influence is humungous, his clothes are coolly wearable—and they can also touch nerves which make grown men cry.
This one? Well, it was about transforming emotional baggage into uplifting wearables—about all the feelings that boys and men pack up in their knapsacks, silently heave on their shoulders and carry across the minefields of life. Green also talked about “the packaged person.” The tangential, wildly associative way he speaks and designs reaches through the medium of clothes to say tender and shocking things. “It’s this idea that you’re given an outfit from birth, and you’ve unfolded and adapted it, but you’re still carrying it all with you,” he said. “It’s the idea that you are what you’ve been. That you wear the imprint of your past on you.”
It began with what Green described as “multiple garments.” None of what Green does ever looks literal, what with the purifying color he runs through things, and the abstracted, horizontal padding techniques he’s evolved. But the references are all there: protective armor, bomb-proof tabards, field hats, clothes which might double as tents or sleeping mats in an emergency.
Green is always out finding his way through the psychological hinterlands of this male territory. He maps it in quilting and embroidery, in signs and symbols which have become specific to him, such as the shoelace tapes (much copied) that he leaves dangling from the channels he sews into garments.
Then suddenly there were flowers, printed in graphic silhouette across the canvas of cotton T-shirts and jeans, or padded into rain ponchos. Green’s ideas are intense, and can be hard to decipher when spoken out loud. All one can be certain of when plunging into the experience of a Craig Green show is that you’ll see things nobody else has ever thought of—like the rubber tubing he made into mesh, which he imagined “packaging” a man like supermarket fruit. Or the four structures made out of venetian blinds and printed chiffon which ended the show.
Yes, it was odd, and some of Green’s utterances about “packaging people” made no immediate sense. But what did make brilliant sense was the fact that he also showed perfectly regular trousers, dyed in the hues of the collection, whilst he was distracting everyone with all the experimental stuff on top. Wantable purely because of their functional design, they’ll be double desirable because they’re product designed by a genius. Craig Green is a young independent who knows how to build a brand, as well as talking audiences to places they’ve never been before.