Craig Green’s shows are always emotional. It’s partly because we’ve known him since the very beginning, partly because he’s a lovely, lovely man, but mostly because, season on season, he seems to deposit a part of himself, of his very being, on to the catwalk. Backstage, he talked about childhood. Not his own, but a collective one – that collective hope a child experiences when they look towards the future, “a child-like attitude of daring,” as the notes put it.
So this morning he took typically masculine codes, and their blueprints, as a starting point – taking military dress and loosening it of its connotations, in the pursuit of (to slightly paraphrase) something purer, and freer. It began with a play on uniform – utility pockets were large on the chest of shirts, while stitched tunnels of fabric ran across outerwear and trousers, like those on a tent, for the poles. There is always a delicacy to Craig’s boys – knitwear clung to their bodies, in a brilliant collage of colour and texture, while the altarpieces (the constructions strapped to the models chests, this season draped with latex) seem to almost dwarf their slight forms, revealing their naked chests and backs beneath.
It makes Craig able to dismantle the manly connotations of the workwear inspirations he begins with – imbuing them with his own brand of romanticism. It ended with a nomadic procession of hooded boys that marched on from last season – quilted, colourful, they fell away into trails of laces. And with that, another wonderful collection. Clothes that stay with you, that demand a second look.
Photographs by Jason Lloyd-Evans
