Photo: Alessandro Lucioni / Gorunway.com
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.
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This article was originally published on Vogue Runway.
