Is Craig Green one man in search of the sublime? It certainly felt something like that to sit show-side, wondering exactly what was going on, while being visually saturated by his waves of beautiful color: white, peach, pinks, sage green, cerulean blue, yellow, beige, brown. As a line in the press release read, Green’s men “have identified a distant new summit to ascend, obscured far from view.”
It would be wholly distorting to try to impose a linear narrative or “journey” on this, but the progress of Green’s travelers is surely through a place where the landscape of masculinity is being questioned, deconstructed, re-mapped.They carry the fragmentary trappings of manual trades, bear witness to the trauma represented by military fatigues, observe the
weirdness and perversity in the codes of business attire, catch distant, ancient memories of heraldry in their long climb towards that far off mountain.
It looked like the first leg had been on horseback. The first guy out had a pair of stirrups swinging from his belt. When the men wrapped in spectacularly padded and quilted blankets came on, the curlicued patterns were partly a salute to the ceramic workers of Wedgwood, combined with the faux-heraldry which Green associates with school crests. All these things that societies do to mold boys a certain way! There was a lot of molding, actually—the business ties were encased in something slick, weird and not-so-nice. At the necks of some of the models were chokers with molded centers that looked alarmingly like medical tracheostomy equipment; and we we all know what that means. Fear and anxiety aren’t hidden in Craig Green’s world.
The thing about Green is the way he’s established his own private iconography; codes within codes that symbolize things to him and can bring forward an astonishing vision of beauty. It’s a quest born of seeing ordinary things, rituals, fraternities, and blue collar work from an almost out-of-body perspective.
That’s where his shows take us: seeing the shock of the ordinary and unnoticed broken apart and exalted. What about where Craig Green and fellow his travelers are going? You do get the impression that he’s leading men—with their climbing and trekking gear and all—to a better place, perhaps somewhere off-world; and certainly somewhere on a spiritual plane.
In this, his closest designer compatriot has to be Rick Owens. Both have the gift of being able to make emotions soar and tremble while pointing towards fear, doom and redemption. And both do it by making perfectly wearable, incredibly down-to-earth clothes that people buy and use every day. It was also an incredibly accessible, practical collection of utility-wear.
