Craig Green’s calling as a designer is dealing both with the physicality of bodies and the deep complexity of human minds. Sometimes, his creativity reaches a point of transcendence when both become almost see-through, and you could swear by the prickling of your skin that that he’s looking into the soul.
There, that sounds pretentious! Yet this is the strange associative trance Green’s collection produced in his audience as he addressed such subjects as the male anatomy, human skin, and the fine membranes that seem to link humans together across cultures.
The floor of his runway was a mirror that created the illusion of models walking across a bottomless chamber. “People scrutinize themselves in mirrors, showing us another possibility of being,” he said. “I wanted to show that things didn’t have to be from one place—not negative or positive, but celebratory.”
People commonly talk about DNA and codes when they speak about brands—Green, the three-time awarded Menswear Designer of the Year, clearly has his: the channel quilting, the ties and tabs, the flatness and geometry, the impression that his clothes relate to utilitywear. All of this puts him recognizably and securely in the practical category of a wearable, saleable designer. He continued to exhibit that throughout this collection, from the opening: leather coats, overalls, and tailored trousers with square external pockets, in black or brown—modern male chic. “It began with thinking a lot about skin—that you wear leather to protect yourself when you’re on a motorbike,” Green said.
Skin: That thought led him to multiple places of research and connection, with “Zoroastrian anatomical drawings, and a weird Egyptian idea—this idea of being embalmed and buried with all your worldly goods” coming into it. He traveled from there into Christian Easter celebrations—resurrection iconography—and the series of papery cutouts, described as “flags made from sails,” which he likened to things he’d seen in Mexican markets.
When you got deep into the symbolism of his extraordinary pieces in padded satin, with ribs and muscle groups scattered over with feathery embroidery, you wondered what the multiple dangling “gloves” were. Look twice or three times, and they started to look less like gloves, and more like the appendages of a flayed body. Or, in Green-speak, “dancing deities.”
One minute, Green is coolly showing easy, pinstripe pajama suits, and the next he’s sending out almost floor-length gingham caftans stamped with some kind of mystic grid pattern. In fact, he said they were “instruction diagrams for folding shirts I saw on a Marie Kondo video.” That last revelation ranks as the most unexpected of London Men’s Fashion Week. As he masterminds his schemes of codes, hieroglyphs, and prints, Craig Green is a down-to-earth guy with a brilliant mind.
