Craig Green (Q2852)
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Craig Green is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Craig Green |
Craig Green is a fashion house from FMD. |
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Craig Green invited his audience of many friends and industry devotees to come to his “home”—his studio in Silvertown, an ex-industrial area far out in London’s docklands. After 10 years in business, Green’s reputation for originality—his unique blend of poetry and pragmatism—means that people will happily travel as far and as long as it takes to witness the coded, sensitive, emotionally complex questions he raises about what makes a man—and who makes him that way? And this time, in the place where he constructs all of his beautifully strange sublimated experiments in craft and concept, it was deeply personal. “I was trying to avoid talking about it because I thought it was maybe sentimental,” he said, afterward. “But it is quite about my dad.” Green is dealing with the loss of his father at the end of last year. “Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationships between sons and fathers and that kind of dual expectation you have [of each other]. It’s kind of about that tension.”Green took a pause in showing recently, while continuing to produce look books and collaborations. In a sun-drenched space—windows overlooking a huge landscape towards the Thames—the guests filtered in: Sarah Burton, Simone Rocha, and Martine Rose; Katy England, Steve McQueen, and, from Paris, Michele Lamy and Adrian Joffe; buyers and reporters from all over. The friendly reunion sense of occasion was palpable.Could we have guessed at the symbolism behind what we were seeing in the moment? On one level, it didn’t matter. Green’s clothing language is grounded in down-to-earth utilitarian chino-type workwear, chore jackets, trench coats, duffels—his core business. It also spectacularly encompasses the deconstruction and reconstruction of pieces of heavy-duty industrial tools and sports equipment, this time made into exoskeletal biker jackets made from Ecco leathers. “Layers and layers of shooting patches and protective patches—functions that are quite dark,” as he put it.Part of that related to Green’s memories of boyhood curiosity, “the childish idea of taking an engine apart to see how it works.” From there, his collection soared into draped, poncho-like merges of cotton handkerchiefs and tea-towels and polo shirts, some of them stamped with naive images of cars and trucks. “Because I always think it’s strange that in children’s bedrooms they have pictures of tractors and fire engines and cement mixers from the day you’re born. Even on the bibs you wore.
”These vestigial universally-shared anxieties arising from male gender conditioning are contained and transformed into beautiful clothes. That’s Craig Green’s magic. His work is about acknowledging memories, and the love and ambivalence wrapped up in them. Ultimately, though especially in this collection, he worked towards a kind of liberation; the freedom to dress in tissue-like layered pajamas or any one of the gorgeously-printed tabards or woven art-pieces he showed at the end.Backstage, his final remark on the subject of returning to the show format was aimed toward the future. “I’ve been thinking a lot about it—well, I think everyone is—about what the next stage of moving forward is in the next 10 years.” Whatever it is, fashion needs creativity like Craig Green’s.
5 June 2024
To mark his 10th anniversary, Craig Green is launching a two-in-one collection. He’s worked on an amalgamation of fall 2023—available to buy now—and spring 2024, coming in six months. Then again the principle of making two things happen at once has been Green’s modus operandi since day one.What he does is fashion as art or the other way around. Pragmatic clothes and emotional depths are inextricably twinned and always doused in beautiful color. “We wanted this kind of duality,” he began, previewing his collection on a dull London summer’s day in his East End studio. In front of us was a surreal sight: one of what he called his “carpet-upholstery men,” a model covered head to toe in curlicue-pattern 3D-pile fabric, all the way down from semi-unzippered balaclava to mittens and moccasins. “I liked where you could see the figure underneath but also see this kind of overly ornate exterior,” he remarked. “I guess it’s the idea of the difference between what you put on show and what is really happening underneath.”There you have it. The attraction of the jacket and trousers, embroidered in a tufted technique derived from what Green described as “collegiate embroidery badges,” is that they’re extractable as highly desirable and wearable luxury menswear—couture, even. This while also being couched (forgive the pun) in something unsettling about masculinity.There are chapters built into all of Green’s collections. The next, equally extraordinary and ordinary: men in quite plain Green-style suits holding various padded and piped articulated forms around themselves. “When we were researching, we found a lot of images of padded bodies that are used for practicing wrestling. They’re sports equipment you use to learn how to fight somebody,” he explained. “It’s a strange way to learn because there’s no pushback. There’s no human. It’s kind of an inanimate object.”Martial-arts themes have been embedded in Green’s work ever since his shades-of-blue judo- or jujitsu-influenced Silent Protest collection made grown men and women cry a decade ago. The making of the abstract forms in this one goes even further back to his relationship with his godfather, an upholsterer.“It was actually really nice to work on this because he was the first person that taught me how to sew. Before I even went to college, we made my first garments. And it’s strange because I remember my first-ever fitting with Louise Wilson for my MA collection.
The night before I had a huge freak-out at my mom’s house and I was like, ‘It’s all rubbish! It’s gonna be a disaster.’ And my godfather stayed up with me all night and cut and remade everything with me.” Green’s face lit up. “And then it was a success.”
26 July 2023
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.
25 June 2022
Emerging from confinement at long last, Craig Green’s first physical show since January 2020 trouped through a vast semi-derelict warehouse on the far eastern fringes of London. The content of it plumbed the meanings Green attaches to some of those words: physicality, the claustrophobia of lockdowns, and the weird psycho-tactile friction between inward sensations and outward appearance that manifest in clothing.“I guess it was about kind of feeling things again, being able to experience things in reality and touch things—and I guess kind of for comfort, but also for suffocation.” Well, Green-land is a landscape where fashion audiences know that complex and alarming symbolisms lurk behind collections that navigate between concept and distinctive, wearable fashion. With its inflatables, multiple textures, and rafts of accessories doused in Green’s extraordinary sense of color, this collection was an extensive spectacular.It started, he said, when he confronted a mohair sweater. Its fibrous hairiness surfaced feelings of pleasure and repulsion and his questioning of what’s for the wearer, and what’s for others to see. “You know, when people wear fluffy things on the outside, it’s like they’re not experiencing the actual material. So is it like they’re trying to make themselves feel more fluffy to other people rather than experiencing the material?” It led him to insert woolly, tufted outcrops on jackets and what looked like hip-wraps—and continue the idea by lining sweatshirts with the stuff.The inside/outside dichotomy might well stand in for the whole experience of the last two years, but Green also translated it into the reversibility and transformability of garments. Some of them—like a gray-green cagoule-like jacket and trousers with green moss-like tufts can be unzippered and rolled up into bag-form.But then: why the inflatables? “We found an image of a man living in an iron lung,” replied Green. That, too— consciously or unconsciously—might throw us back on pandemic-related trauma; the idea of being helped to breathe medically, but also physically confined. Medical equipment has always been one of Green’s fields of curiosity (his mother is a nurse). With this one, though, it had a whole other fetishitic tangent. “I guess it’s like pleasure and suffocation, in a nice way. I guess that kind of crosses over into a sexual thing, as well. Because sometimes you don’t like to share with people what you actually like.”
9 February 2022
“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.”
30 October 2020
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.
19 January 2020
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.
10 June 2019
What you see is not what you get at a Craig Green show—the impact is also in what you feel and what you hear. It’s how he can be simultaneously a “wearable” designer who has devised a plainly relatable workwear genre while being tuned into a soulful wavelength that stirs men up like no one else. Start with what he said at the end: “I was thinking of this man made of glass, and that idea doesn’t have to mean fragility. It can also mean strength.”There was a soundtrack of overlapping choral chants, classical orchestral passages, and, at one point, a snatch of bagpipes: spiritually roaming aural effects to saturate the brain while trying to make out the layered codes embedded in his clothes. “There were lots of ideas about medieval tradition and craft as we went through it,” he said.So much here is normal and plain seeming: matte fabrics, cross-body straps, and wrapped belts; things closely related to trenchcoats; double-breasted jackets and cargo pants. And so much seems to refer to religious clothing, the martial arts, and (when he really takes off on a tangent) things that suggest strange states of falling apart, or the loneliness of plastic-clad, hooded men trudging toward an apocalypse.It’s to be supposed that’s why the poll of international retailers and editors voted Green the menswear designer of the year at last month’s Fashion Awards; though still so young, he left behind the “emerging” designation long ago. He’s the designer with the flag (he has often referred to flags) who has the power to lead men into a liminal territory where this stuff can be imagined and its ambiguity taken seriously. Thus, when the “glass men” finally appeared (if that’s what they literally represented) on his runway, they were wearing sheets of plastic—red, green, pink, blue—which were somehow ruched, bubbled, and smocked on the torso, as if treated to granny-knitting techniques. Not clothes, really, but translucent windows on feelings.The menswear fraternity has a high threshold of tolerance for all of Green’s experiential dimensions, because he also makes clothes that sell. But then again, over the past few days, it has been the designers who use fashion to express sensitive, delicate feelings, and who astonish with unexpected technique, who have stood out. As the phase of generic sportswear retreats, something much more nuanced, exciting, and deep is being ushered in. Green is a leader who is taking us there.
7 January 2019
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.
14 June 2018
“It’s like you took your mum’s old curtains and made a Jet Ski out of it.” The things you hear backstage at fashion shows! Craig Green is nothing if not a sensible, non-pretentious chap, and one who has been twice voted Menswear Designer of the Year by an international panel of retailers and editors. As such, his every word is hung on for its meaning. Yet the way Green’s synapses fire, the visual connections he makes are utterly unlike anyone else’s: Who else has ever thought it logical to construct wooden frames and have men carry them around in front of them at a fashion show? It’s disturbing when a designer’s impulses aren’t easy to follow, when they don’t fit a known template, when they aren’t explained by his or her having gone to a gallery, read a book, or taken a holiday. In a way, that’s the whole effect of being at a Craig Green show: It’s the worrying thrill of trying to understand his shapes and his reasoning; the guesswork he puts you through, the certainty that he’s breaking untrodden terrain.From the way Green was speaking, this much seemed apparent: that there was a tension going on between the freedom of childlike creativity and the rigidity of military uniforms. Of the series of monumental corded, hooded, full-length parkas, he said, it’s “like when you’re a kid, and you imagine a tent can fly. They’re like human tents.” Human tents, he added, that were also “medieval Celtic flags.” Trusting in his imagination, dreams, nightmares, mental free associations, or whatever they are is part of the reason Green is considered an original, no matter how discombobulatingly mad his inspirations sound turned into words.Yet Green is never quite off in the realms of abstract conceptualism. He also spoke about “gig lines,” a term which turns out to refer to the strict alignment of shirt, belt, and fly fastening in military uniform. Thus, presumably, the evolution of the vertical, sometimes tubular, lines that ran through garments. And somewhere in there, there was a thought about “putting a man in a mold.” That’s what the military does, of course. It literally molds and constricts men. Green took the notion of making a cast and including the marginal pieces that are normally cut off afterward. They became fins on trousers, extra outlining on a gray jersey sweatsuit.There are simple things here, and things that make you keep staring in near disbelief. Between these two extremes lies the reason Craig Green has a flourishing business.
8 January 2018
With Craig Green, we’re looking into the soul of a man. The symbolic language he speaks through his clothes has gently pried open a spiritual portal, a ceremonial outlet for touching on emotions and existential longings which can move modern men to tears. Green described the impulses and tensions that were running through his mind while he was designing this season. “It really started with thinking about utopia and escape, asking what paradise would be,” he said. “But then it got darker.”Who can escape? By painful coincidence, Green’s show was held in high-vaulted Victorian railway arches not half a mile away from the still closed-off crime scene of Borough Market. The burdens of current reality are all around us, within and without. In Green’s world, they’re manifested in the psychic effort to rise above it, to attain some kind of code of masculine dignity—but then, too, to armor and protect oneself. Some of his brotherhood were carrying strange structures made of wood, stretch jersey fabric, and tasseled ropes, a continuation of the abstract narrative he began in his graduation show from Central Saint Martins MA.Half of the absorption in watching his show was keeping an eye on how fantastically well Green is developing his idiosyncratic techniques, both artistically and commercially. There were torso-defining draped and knotted T-shirts, pulled tight with drawstrings. The grommeted portholes he used as purely abstract devices in previous shows are now simple-but-sexy identifiers in his line of denim.By the end, the paradise thread blossomed into brilliantly colored oversize collages of palm trees, beach scenes, and a parrot, printed onto blanket wraps, cagoules, and outsize scarves. Green described the fabrication, laughingly, as “like beach mats.” They were outstanding and uplifting, a career landmark which confirms Craig Green as the equal of any menswear designer in Paris, Milan, or elsewhere. Out of these dark times, this complex, sensitive talent shines.
12 June 2017
It depends what you want out of fashion. Something usefully good-looking, and that’s that? Or something that signals meaning? Well, Craig Green, newly crowned British menswear designer of the year, is certainly in the second camp. His show today was one of London’s poignantly symbolic creative responses to the omnipresent atmosphere of dread that bedevils our days. Either you attempt to elude it by escaping into fantasy—like Charles Jeffrey’s Loverboy performance earlier in the day—or you face the fear, like Green. “It’s like being scared of something, which is massive weight. Fear of the unknown,” he said. One of Green’s fears is the vastness of the sea. His men and boys were mariners and submariners, sou’westered, uniformed, and sunk in some terrifying end-of-the-world battle for survival.Now, that may sound too dramatic—depths that aren’t apparent if you look at the pictures. Green’s narrative is a continuum from one season to the next. It’s allusive, not literal, always signaling emotional stuff about the plight of masculine identity—aggression versus sensitivity, spirituality versus utilitarianism. His way of abstracting military and religious clothing into planes, his trailing ties, is well known. And all present here again, only this time laden with far more of a sense of foreboding.There was an army of single-color cotton drawstring sailor’s smocks with hoods and wide pants—navy or brownish violet. There were fragmented elements of Eisenhower jackets, tied with tubular belts that Green described as “like oxygen tubes,” slightly suffocating felted and quilted materials. It did set the imagination flailing for explanations. Might the guys at the end, with their padded hoods and their big metal- latched buttons, be the lonely occupants of a bunker or the crew of a nuclear sub, facing the inevitable? Was there some last prayer hallucinations of priests in church-carpet robes being sent up here? Well, if you like. It was fashion not waving, but drowning, but bravely done all the same.
6 January 2017
There’s something strangely English about what Craig Green does. The focus on craftsmanship. The storytelling. The practicality embedded into the garments. Even the name of his barely three-year-old label has a steadfast, stolid, even stoic quality. Alright, it’s Green’s own name, but it doesn’t make it any less worthy of analysis. And as London’s Spring 2017 menswear shows are choked by the traffic and road blockages caused by Queen Elizabeth’s 90th birthday celebration (the “Official” one, rather than her actual birthdate), it was difficult to look at Green’s latest collection and not see a reflection of Great Britain.Or, maybe, not. Craig Green’s clothes are open to interpretation and extrapolation; when Green himself talks about them, he generally references wide and bold. This time, he talked about flags, about garments flapping like tarpaulins around the body, about saturated colors strung like bright bunting, and a draped number that reminded him of the white fabric of surrender. “The whole collection was initially based around a Scout scarf,” he said backstage. “That symbolism of ‘belonging’ to something.” He frequently mentioned the word “romantic,” and the notion of the whole thing feeling impulsive. As ever, you were encouraged to weave your own story into what Green did.From a nuts and bolts perspective, Green shifted his collection on considerably from last season, and, indeed, the seasons before, as he explored complex color and pattern and intricate construction methods. This collection marked something of a turning point. Well it might. Earlier this year, he received theGQFashion Fund prize, a grant of more than $200,000 enabling him to propel his business to the next level. Green’s garments have always been superlatively made, but this time, there was a new variety to them. His trademark brief workman’s jackets came quilted and laced, in Moorish hand-blocked prints; there were hooded anoraks, and stand-out papery trench coats snaked with eyelets and ties.If there’s a limit to what Green does, thus far it’s technical. His proposition overall strikes you as waist-up—jackets, coats, intriguing hybrids between the two. By contrast, Green’s wide-legged pants, stitched and laced and often left flailing, may have been instrumental in broadening the hemlines of tailoring across the board, but it’s difficult to imagine men wearing them in real life. Clever, then, to broaden that top-heavy offering, and play to his strengths.
10 June 2016
AskCraig Green—British fashion’s favorite conceptualist—how he feels about being labeled thus, and he wrinkles his nose a bit and grins incredulously. “We never start with a concept,” he shrugs. “It’s just things that feelright.” Maybe that’s why Green’s shows, and his clothes, resonate quite so loudly. There isn’t a great deal of gumption being thrown around when he describes his clothes: It’s all about fabrics and techniques. And Sylvanian Families. “They inspired all the colors at the start,” he said, swiftly adding, “. . . maybe I shouldn’t tell you that.”As ever, the layers of references embedded in Green’s garms are only matched by the ones each individual viewer reads into them. All those small parts add up to a big whole. It links back to what feels right: This time, Green was thinking, in abstract terms, about the new and the old, about disposability—he mentioned tear-away hospital scrubs, which his clothes often superficially resemble—versus things you keep forever. “Like the blankets,” he said, throwing his hands wide to indicate the intricately embroidered, quilted, washed, and re-washed coverlets that resembled the ones Linus clutched in thePeanutscomic strips.Those ideas were played out again and again: A bouclé was, in Green’s words, “like an old towel”; silks and leathers (the first time Green has used either) were heavily processed, by hand, washed, and re-washed, the subdued sickly colors a riposte, he said, to last season’s acid brights. By contrast, other garments were either strapped firmly—permanently—against the body, or dissected by lacing or buttons only half fastened, as if caught in a moment before furling away. That notion, of the dispensable versus the everlasting, is something fashion is tussling with as part of a bigger picture right now. It’s why brands are differentiating between “fashion” and “luxury,” the former referring to flibbertigibbet seasonal upheaval, the latter to staid styles built to last forever. Conglomerate CEOs are struggling to wrap their heads around reconciling those two antithetical conceits; seeing a designer as green as Green nailing it is arresting.Thinking back to Linus, and indeed to all our childhood blankies, I couldn’t help but stumble across the notion of protection. That’s why we cling on to those scraps of cloth, after all—to feel protected.
Green opened his show with a tailored hazmat suit—he referenced uniforms; layering tailoring; thepourpointdoublets of medieval knights, stuffed to pad out the convex shapes of plate armor. Green called the down-stuffed pads clutched in models’ hands or dangling from their belts his “punching bags.” He was initially going to strap them around his models, as if armoring them against the world.It’s difficult to pinpoint why this collection felt soright, as Green says. But it did. Perhaps it’s because, as global financial markets shudder, again—$2.3 trillion was wiped off them this week—we all want to feel protected. Maybe Green himself feels wary, and unsure, a young designer showing in a turbulent industry, whose very foundations are shifting as we watch. But how prescient he built protection into his collection, because Green’s clothes—his talent—are just that. They’re his armor against the vagaries of the fashion world. And they’re utterly exceptional and unique. No concept needed.
8 January 2016
"A single, improbably picturesque image." That was how Craig Green cued audience response to his Spring show today. True, there was a uniformity to the collection, the earnest young men and women walking in now-familiar variations of his mutated martial arts outfits/utilitywear, with the quilting, the wrapping, and the ties that bind streaming behind. But where the clothes took a new kind of flight for Green was in the palette of primary colors: orange, red, yellow, blue, and, appropriately, a glorious shade of grass green. Green's shows have always been drenchingly emotional affairs. Today, it was the soundtrack (Hans Zimmer's music forInterstellar) that was doing all the heavy lifting, while the clothes were playful, "bounding with chemical energy" (more words from the PR prompt).Green said the campaign he's just been working on with Nick Knight energized him in a way that took him back to college and the graduate collection that first flayed his name on London fashion, and he wanted to bring that spirit to Spring. Knight's images make Green's clothes dance. The spectacle of them in extreme movement is a revelation, one which the runway unfortunately can't duplicate. But knowing that other dimension exists was beneficial to today's presentation, because otherwise you might be compelled to wonder if it's a little too soon for Green to be dipping into his own back pages for inspiration. Is it conceivable that the intense spotlight that has been thrown on him has fazed him a little? So going back to his roots after a mere handful of seasons could reflect Green's yen to remind himself why he wanted to dothisin the first place.He talked backstage about getting back in touch with thecraftof his work, but that is always obvious in his carefully layered and wrapped outfits. What was more intriguing today was the sly humor that snuck in here and there. "I'm scared of becoming serious," he said with a little aw-shucks laugh. No risk of that with tops featuring twisted nipples of fabric bound tight with rubber bands, or long lactating streams of cloth, worn by both male and female models. There were other feminizing flourishes, layered skirts and quilted jackets tied high, empire-style. More cause for wonder: Was Green somewhat eccentrically acknowledging his sizable female following? At least half of his magazine coverage has featured women in his clothes, and this will be the first collection that is sized for his female fans.
Or is he more interested in creating a new gender in fashion? There were, once again, on his catwalk huge banners, big squares of fabric with a slit at eye level and a hole cut at chest height so the soul could float free. This time, the image was blank, but itwasimprobably beautiful.
12 June 2015
There were no tears at the end of Craig Green's show today. It would have been a hard trick to pull off twice. Besides, we've had six months to process the impact of his first solo catwalk show last June. But that isn't to say that the collection he presented wasn't mesmerizing; it was simply more pragmatic than Spring. Green cryptically described that show as "a silent protest." Now, he said, "The silent protest has got louder." You could put it another way: Spring was spirit, Fall is flesh.The idea of the uniform lies heavy on menswear for Fall 2015, and Green was no exception to the rule of designers who are brooding this season on the meaning of uniforms. In his mind, it has to do with protection. The padding and layering of many of his looks created formidable silhouettes. Balancing them were simple white jersey tops grabbed and twisted into shape on the models' torsos, then stitched like the seams on Frankenstein's monster. "The most brutal way of fitting clothes," Green was a little embarrassed to admit, but that was surely one way to convey the vulnerability he wanted as a counterpoint to the tough, structured outerwear. "Restriction and release" was his formula.Similar reasoning meant the models walked shoeless. Never mind that finding the right shoes for these looks would present an expensive challenge, Green insisted that socks were more innocent (for the show at least). The knitwear was also making a statement about susceptibility. It featured a circular hole above the sternum. "The most vulnerable part of the body," Green explained. "In cartoons, it's where you see the soul flying away like a ghost."If this is the sort of thing that's on Green's mind when he's designing a sweater, the sky's the limit for conjecture about the rest of the collection. He described the color palette of red, navy, and green as "classical school colors," and there were white cotton shirts with squared-off tails to compound the school uniform effect. But the way he structured his show, the red sat at the heart, with the other colors revolving around it, like they were protecting it. "Concealed power," Green called it. So there was a picture bigger than the look-by-look cavalcade we were seeing on the catwalk. It was a dark picture, too. Listening to Green talk about his clothes, it wasn't hard to detect a pessimistic streak. Maybe that's what adds the poignancy to the beauty of his proposals. Maybe that's what people sensed when they responded with tears last season.
However that worked, Green's sales tripled. So, concealed or not, there's power in the poignant.
12 January 2015
You hear about this thing called a fashion moment—a storm of emotion leaving the audienceverklemmtand the designer overwhelmed—but the genuine article is rare enough to be an urban myth. Until it actually happens. Which it did today during Craig Green's show. We were primed forsomethingwith Green's solo debut on London's fashion stage—his past appearances have involved a grand scale and a fearlessness that rather transcended the notion of clothes as we know them. His new collection added purity to the mix, and purity as we understand the notion in spiritual terms. "Zen" was one of Green's own reference points, but the mind spiraled away effortlessly into visions of samurais and gurus and barefoot penitents and the Polyphonic Spree and even, for one bedazzled brainiac in the audience, the Children's Crusade.Cosmic drama has been a mainstay of Green's work since he began, from the tie-dye that evoked hippie idealism, to the sweeping robes that suggested pagan ritual, to the huge frames he attached to his clothes in defiance of quotidian limitations. Those frames reappeared in his new collection trailing banners, the bannermen leading "a mass exodus toward the brink of abandon," according to the press release. Following the show, Green himself cryptically dubbed this catwalk exodus "a silent protest." He would say no more, preferring to maintain a sense of mystery. But one prime possibility was that his collection was a repudiation of crass repetitive materialism and an endeavor to create a new community in fashion. At the same time, there was such vulnerability, such melancholy (Wim Mertens' "Struggle for Pleasure" was the soundtrack), that one was compelled to acknowledge the impossibility of such a vision. Green seemed to agree.As for the garments themselves, there was, for the first time, a focus on the clothing rather than the cloth. There were two silhouettes: exploded, skirt-like volumes that were defined by strings that tied fluttering layers around arms and legs, and body-conscious jersey wraps with significant cutouts. Warrior, priest, sacrificial lamb…all of these came to mind. In Green's effort to expand the idea of what clothes can convey, he comes close to Rei Kawakubo. But another maverick sensibility also insinuated itself. Vivienne Westwood called her epochal Seditionaries collections Clothes for Heroes. That's what we saw on Green's catwalk. That's what the audience was responding to. The Cult of Craig is about to explode.
16 June 2014