“Our shows are usually very fantasy-led,” says Craig Green. “But every time I tried to think about what ‘fantasy’ is right now I realized that what I was fantasizing about is reality.” Green regularly fuses feelings of solace and distress, panic and calm into his clothes, as if he’s always been building some sort of male emotional armor: baggage and equipment for facing the world. But where would he go psychologically when the “world” was suddenly compressed into the space within four walls?
Answer: “I went to the studio on my own, and started making shirts as soon as lockdown happened. I wasn’t sure why. I just wanted to start pattern-cutting myself. Working on the shape and fit of garments,” Green says. “There was something about that feeling of reality, which got me thinking that how we dress now is really for our own comfort and pleasure. You don’t get seen by people very much. Our intimacy with clothing has changed a lot, so it’s really about what makes us feel good.”
Well, with its soft padded zones, tactile brushed cotton surfaces, and non-constricting shapes, Craig Green’s work has always been palpably easy and pleasurable to wear. This is the territory he owns, which is nowhere near the realms of pajamas and tracksuits. But trust him: odd, contradictory, logical—unfathomable things have also cropped up in Green’s summer season; partly about a retreat to childhood, and partly about the surreality of masculine formal-wear conventions in the age of working at home. “Like, what can things like a tie mean?” he exclaims rhetorically. “A tie is really alien to us. We’ve never done one here before. A tie is just a piece of fabric. It could be a sash or a belt. But it has its own symbolism.”
So there’s a black tie, at one point worn with a white shirt, which is layered under a cotton tank, with cropped black trousers—and a pair of foot-wrapped sandals for the domestic exec. “They’re like a strange rubber sock,” Green muses. “The reason for those shoes was it was about reality again. You touch things with your hands so much, but you don’t really feel anything with your feet. I thought it was nice that you’re feeling the ground under you. You become grounded in reality again, feel the floor, the grass, that you’re treading on.”
Headspaces change too when we’re locked in, as we’ve all learned this year. Literally, that idea appears to be manifesting in Green’s headpieces: silver metal devices dangling silver balls and fabric drawstring pouches. “They’re almost like a baby’s mobile above a crib. Comforting or reassuring, if you looked at them in one way,” Green contends. “But I also liked how the models looked bright-eyed because of the silver balls. The models can only see their own eyes, but you can see yourself too. I also liked that they looked like the solar system, that you’d have made at school. If you’re wearing it, it’s almost as if you have huge planets passing your eyes because they look so big. It becomes more daunting.”
He says that the big caped-coat shapes also came from his memory of being a schoolboy. “We used to put our jackets over our heads and let them flare out like capes. Kind of innocent.” All lined up, he says, the colors of cloaks seem to click together. “Like a broken rainbow. Individually, they look like nothing, but together they created a rainbow. At first I thought that was cheesy, but then, I thought it was truth or purity in a way. Like how a certain pop song can make people cry across all ages and groups.”
Small things that we might have taken for granted a year ago have taken on huge significance now, that is absolutely for sure. “It’s almost more interesting to see a face right now,” Green observes. “The fantasy is to see a human face. It was fantasy in a different way in previous collections. I started to become obsessed with how things felt; the smaller details you don’t get to see on a catwalk.”
Don’t get him wrong: Craig Green misses doing a runway show: “It’s what I got into it for,” he laughs. “Runways are such a simple idea, but the emotional impact of it, you can’t explain.” Instead, all his ideas are condensed (so far) into a look book, which neatly covers everything he’s known for: screen-frameworks wholly obliterating a couple of human forms, included. “It’s funny though,” he concludes. “Almost, it was clothing that was the starting point, for the first time. As soon as the world started to change, it felt that extravagance didn’t feel right—or that it wasn’t escapism at all. Because reality feels like escapism now—the reality of getting dressed, seeing someone, or getting dressed to go to work. Now that we’re not living like that any more.”
