Photos: Yannis Vlamos – Indigital.tv
Craig Green has never taken an easy way out. Not even this time. 30-year-old London based designer set his Spring-Summer 2018 collection in railway arches in south London, a few minutes away from the crime scene at Borough Market that was still largely closed at the time. In a state of great disturbance and turbulent presence Green managed to create something truly profound. With an ease typical to himself he illuminated the patterns of clothing design. For at least a fraction of time in reality when the models were walking down the catwalk our dreaming selves have been dug up and brought back to life. Essentially, Green gives us a chance to forget the dark times that we live in.
Craig Green is a sensitive soul and he appears to be meditating about shapes and forms, color and cuts, rather than calculating them. It’s important to understand him as a storyteller of costumes that don’t derive from couture. They remind us the work wear of our working-class parents and grandparents, the dusty pictures taken of their young at the time postures covered with mundane uniforms, all similar to each other, boring as hell, yet somehow alluring. In a Vogue interview, Green explains this obsession: “My family were all tradesmen. My dad was plumber and my mother was a nurse – they were working people who wore uniforms. The whole brand is based around ideas of communal dress, and romanticising things that might not really be so obviously romantic.” That ‘uniformal’ approach to design gives him a freedom to manipulate the garment in a way that regardless how he decides to make it at the end it all falls into one single unity – a look, an emotion, a story.
Green sees a piece of cloth as an idealist. There is a strong sense of escapism. It leads us to believe that the collection derived from his hands would allow us to distance ourselves from this present moment, to travel to some other dimension. Green says that “even in hard times, people need to have dreams and fantasies.” And it’s not simply a comforting thought. It is primarily a sign of great trust in what the fashion design can do. It creates hope in the industry that is so inevitably tied with capitalist and consumerist burdens which don’t let us close our eyes for a second. It plagues us even while we sleep.
For Craig Green Spring-Summer 2018 collection the designer did exactly that – he created a narrative of exploring an undiscovered terrain set in vivid paradise. It set us to rest at ease, to stay still. Variety of oversized scarves, wrapped blankets, graphic palms and parrots were described by the designer as akin to “beach mats”. The most intriguing moment of the collection was the “walking altarpieces”. Uncanny sculpture-like wooden devices were used to hold white, khaki, blue fabrics and covered most space of the human body. Green’s architectural sensitivity to the garment was back on the catwalk. Once again, he proved his ability to reinterpret the term ‘nnovation’ even though it’s so overused in the verbal hype employed by fashion industry. Tropical sunrise blended with paradise lost in the palette suitable for the characters of adventurous type: from hippy nomads taken out of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” to sun-kissed beach lovers that crave for a drink straight out of the freezer.
However, Green’s paradise is not for everyone. It might not be as idyllic as it appears from the shots in Instagram taken by the front row. The designer has told that the initial idea behind the collection was a utopia in which humanity could one day take refuge. “But then it got darker”, he added. That’s why Craig Green was truly the best choice to create costumes for Ridley Scott’s “Alien: Covenant”. The paradise appeared to be further away than we initially thought and no one was ready for it. But Green knows what to do when things turn strange.
