November 1, 2022 |
“People always say it looks like B&Q in here,” Craig Green says, laughing. “Because we have all the materials, wood and everything, set up and stacked in the studio.” The designer was busy preparing for his big re-entry in Paris at his studio in Royal Victoria Dock in the East End of London when we talked over Zoom in early June.
Three weeks later, it was a show which I thought easily took its place in the top three of menswear shows internationally. I had tried to get some advance insight into what he was planning, but as usual, that was futile.
Not that Green’s at all hush-hush and secretive about how he works. “We’re moulding at the moment. Learning how to wet-mould materials,” he says, helpfully. “We’ve got a big paddling pool set up in the kitchen, where we’re soaking big bits of fabric to mould on wooden shapes made out of MDF. We’re kind of clamping materials into them and drying them in strange ways.So that’s our job at the moment – being covered in water!”
It’s just that you can never predict – not exactly – how a Craig Green collection will manifest, or how it’s going to hit your head and senses. To sit at any of his shows is to be swept along in a state of wonder and puzzlement; a complexity of feeling that douses you in the river of his amazing colour-sense, while signalling disturbing, dystopian fears surrounding the burden of maleness. And then, somehow, he’ll hold out visions of spiritual or otherworldly escape. This is a unique Greenian language that no-one else can touch (although he has many copyists).He speaks through strange paraphernalia, baggage, tools, protective equipment, camping and trekking equipment, which frequently and completely obliterate the men who are shouldering them. And then through abstracted robes or ceremonial wraps, garments which seem to hold out some kind of ascendance, off-world or transcendent redemption.
Yet on his website, it says simply that Craig Green’s brand is based on “concepts of uniform and utility”. This is true, and the factor which has caused a crucial part of his brand to cut through to become a staple. Leave aside the “concepts” for a minute and it’s completely clear that he’s invented a work-wear jacket, a boxy, trusted shape, sometimes with his signature channelled padding and tapes, which men of many sizes, shapes and generations find easy to wear. Few designers ever reach the point of having such a best-selling, identifiable, continuing, commercial, cult garment.
Where Green is speaking from is familiar to me. He had his AW show in east London in avast neighbouring warehouse space in February; his first show in two years. He’s excited by the history of the docklands area on the Thames and the fact that he can watch it under going regeneration. “We wanted to show in this area, which is like our home in a way. As soon as we moved in we found it really inspirational. It has a strange, futuristic feeling because you have the cable car over the river and you can see The O2 Arena in the sunset. It’s got a strange metropolis-industrial feeling, which suits us as well. And lots of factories are still functioning.” His studio is based in Royal Victoria Dock, near the huge Tate & Lyle mill. “And when the Golden Syrup factory is working, you can smell the sugar in the air.”
What of the clothes? “I guess the whole collection was a bit about feeling and touching things again. We wanted everything to feel sensory somehow. We were really thinking about the experience of the guests and how they would feel sitting in the space. Not just on normal seating but on something unusual that you could feel was part of it.”
Huge, snaking, inflated tubes were laid out through a nearby warehouse. When you sat down, you realised that they were filled with water – a bouncily weird Craig Green sensation. “Oh yes: they were actually flood barriers that are used for emergencies”, he says. “You know, they come in, put them in cities and places. So, we rented them.” There were tubes draped over the shoulders of some of the looks, too. By the end, the conceptual pieces started to remind you of inflatable life rafts. The ever-presence of climate disaster and, frankly, war, are always calling somewhere in the background of his work.
In this collection, he was also looking at the claustrophobia of tufty knitwear and delving into rubber. “I guess we were playing with lots of gross textures, which to some people are pleasure, and to some are fear. Latex and stuff like that – and lots of boiled, tufted wool, because I know lots of people hate the feeling of wool on their skin. We had tufting but it was all on the inside of the garment so you could really feel yourself encased in it.” He referred to the circular pocket openings on jackets as inspired by “the pocket valves in the sides of iron lungs, which let nurses touch the patient. All of them were made at a specialist rubber factory. The people we worked with make diving suits and an anaesthetic breathing bladder for medical use. They’re a dip-moulding factory. It was fun trying to convince them to make these! They were like: ‘What is that for?’
If that was Green’s way of processing of the general social trauma of lockdown, the ideas of suffocation and people breathing on ventilators, he and his team got a bit more than they were bargaining for. “It was strange, because a lot of the stuff that we were doing had certain smells to it as well, which were kind of gross. Some of the colour ways that we got done in the factory were cured wrongly. It had a very particular smell to it. The models were trapped in mohair with this smelly latex,” he says with a chuckle.
It was also the first sighting of Green’s use of carpentry and DIY in his work; the beginning of his serial salutes to manual trades and skilled, working-class artisans. Over time, it’s led him to show vast conceptual rigs, ladders, tools and, for a Moncler installation in Milan, huge mechanical structures which flapped, bounced and rotated – half human, half helicopter. His thrill in invention goes back to his happy, extended-family childhood in Hendon, north London, and his teenage years, which were spent getting involved with making things.
“I went down a creative route when I was younger because I was surrounded by people that were building and making things”, he says. “My dad’s a plumber. My uncle was an upholsterer. After school I used to earn money to go and strip sofas for him – like pull out the staples. He was the first person that taught me how to sew as well. And then, my other uncles… One’s a carpenter. One’s a property developer so I used to, on the weekends, help them take apart houses. My stepdad loves DIY so he used to help me with wood and stuff like that. Oh, and my godfather was very into mediaeval re-enactments, snow globes with wizards and making stuff out of clay; he helped with my all projects to do my GCSEs.”
You can absolutely understand where Green’s extraordinary talent comes from. Right down to the fact that medieval heraldry – or a reimagined graphic version of it – appeared in his Paris show in June: men were dramatically wrapped in colourful conceptual flags decorated with shields and curliques. Initially, it had pointed towards the young Green taking fine art at Central Saint Martins. “When I was at school, I wanted to be maybe a sculptor or a painter. Then at CSM I changed route when I discovered fashion. I was so excited because I thought if you did fashion could be everything: it didn’t have to be just art, or just photography. You could do art direction and storytelling, clothing and dressing people, and there’s also a human aspect of it which I really loved. That experimentation is always what I’ve loved. That’s what I see fashion as.
Besides, the Central Saint Martins’ MA studio under the late, and formidable, Professor Louise Wilson was a much more fun place to be (and she, notoriously hard to please, adored Green). “I liked the community side of it, because none of the art students were ever there,” he says with a chuckle. “Whereas in fashion, everyone would be queuing up to get in in the morning, everybody would be thrown out by the security guards in the evening. And then everyone would go out and party as well.”
The way he’s set up the Craig Green company reflects that sense of community, too: a place where he’d made his idea that “fashion can be everything” real. “We’re split in three ways in the offices. One third are more like actual production, distribution, finance, sales, all of that kind of stuff, and also the design room, which is predominantly on computers. And then we have an affiliate studio setup, which is a lot of making, a lot of experimentation, and the sewing and pattern-cutting. And then there’s a multi-use space where we build sculptures; big things for our campaigns, sculpted pieces for the show. We set up store installation inside the studio, which is a rare thing to have.”
He smiles as he concludes: “I think that’s why I like having my own brand, because it is like a family. You really spend time with the people that you work with, get to know them so well. But I’m always obsessed with materials and working in new ways to do things. It’s about never repeating [myself]. Everyone in my studio is always like “Please can we make something we know how to do?”’ And with that, he’s off to see how things are going in the Craig Green paddling pool.
Taken from Issue 56 of 10 Men – PEACE, COURAGE, FREEDOM – out now. Purchase here.
CRAIG GREEN: FEELING IT
Photographer VANINA SORRENTI
Fashion Editor GARTH ALLDAY SPENCER
Text SARAH MOWER
Hair RAPHAEL SALLEY at Saint Luke Artists using Davines
Model JACOB ADOLPHO at Tomorrow Is Another Day
Lighting assistant MICHAEL FURLONGER
Fashion assistant BRITTANY NEWMAN
Digital operator PHILLIP BRADLEY
Casting ADAM HINDLE
Special thanks to CRAIG GREEN STUDIO
