Craig Green’s Deceptively Uncomplicated Sophistication
Craig Green’s London studio is situated in the industrial docklands of the city’s outskirts. It is a sprawling, top-floor space with multiple rooms devoted to everything from cutting and sewing to storage of his archive. When I visited on a rare sunny English day in September, a sense of serenity pervaded, the opposite of the frantic anxiety fashion is known for. Green assured me this ambience was anomalous, yet one could imagine it as the constant — like most workplaces, the mood comes from the top. Although Green is one of the most exciting British designers to come out of the city’s vibrant fashion ecosystem in the past 10 years, his demeanor is entirely unassuming and a breath of fresh air in an industry filled with drama. He speaks softly, often using “we” instead of “I” when discussing his work process. Only his lively blue eyes betray the assured intellect that over the past decade of the brand’s existence has birthed some of the most conceptual menswear in the world.
By pairing uniforms of all sorts — workwear, religious, school, military, sport — with unconventional fabrics, protruding forms, and evocative silhouettes, Green has managed to merge the mundane with the surreal and marry practicality with creativity. All of which has propelled him to the top echelons of fashion. Green’s designs can also be slightly unsettling. There is an offness to them that makes one wonder, “How did he come up with that?” This was particularly evident in his Spring/Summer 2023 collection, in which a recurrent detail was inspired by the cover of a military watch intended to keep sand out while in the desert. Partly because of its placement on the neck, virtually all reviewers confused it with a piece of tracheostomy equipment.
Some of Green’s fabrics have a quality that makes them oddly attractive and repulsive at the same time; the kind of tactility that demands obsessive, almost fetishistic, attention. I’ve never worn a Craig Green garment (of which I own half a dozen) without spending considerable time contemplating its construction or fit. In the street, they inevitably draw the kind of double takes that occur when one’s subconscious catches something unordinary. My latest Craig Green purchase is what I call “a social-distancing coat,” because its sides feature multiple protrusions akin to the joining slips on paper doll outfits. The fabric is part polyamide, part paper, and part aluminum, which gives the garment a life of its own.
That 10 years have passed since Green’s first catwalk show is something that Green himself finds hard to believe. And yet, as we pore over the photos from his shows — in London, in Florence, and in Paris — his body of work is impressive both in its progression and in its coherence. In addition to his own line, Green has ongoing collaborations with Moncler and adidas, and has designed costumes for the film Alien: Covenant.
Despite his achievements, Green remains firmly grounded. Six days a week he drives with his partner for an hour and 20 minutes to the studio to work for most of the day. Green especially prizes Saturdays, when the rest of his staff is off, allowing him a respite from emails and the space to concentrate on designing.
Green works in three dimensions — that’s why a lot of materials he uses aren’t exactly the stuff clothes are typically made of. “We’re very crafty here,” Green says, pointing to an adjacent room full of fabric, dyes, and plywood two-by-fours. “It’s quiet today, but usually, we are painting here on the floor, there’s people making stuff out in the yard. It’s never like, ‘We draw the collection.’ It’s more like, ‘How do we make this work?’” The results could be tops woven by hand from rubber akin to that used in casings to prevent bottles of wine from breaking in transit (or fruit from being bruised). Or the results could be inflatable boots, like those that Green once made for adidas; they could be jackets for Moncler that to some observers recalled anal beads.
In the same spirit, Green often rounds out his collections with objects he refers to as “statues.” These statues could be anything from a wooden or metal frame with fabric stretched over it to a shield with dangling spurs. None of them are strictly necessary, and not exactly wearable, but they add to Green’s aesthetic universe.
“I think the reason I liked fashion when I was studying it was because it can be anything,” says Green. “There are so many different aspects to it. It’s like the mathematics of pattern cutting or textiles as graphics. There’s also a human element to it because it’s always on the body. And putting on a show, there’s a theatrical element.”
And a community element, as well. Partly, this appeals to Green as someone whose childhood was spent in a tight-knit family in a working-class neighborhood of Northwest London. “The kind of place where everyone at the local pub knows your parents,” says Green. He still lives there, not far from his parents and his sister. Green’s father is a plumber and his mother is a nurse. He attended the same grammar school as his mother and grandfather. Green’s godfather, with whom he is still close, is an upholsterer, and the first person to teach him how to sew. Green is first in his family to get a higher education, and first to go into a creative field, which definitely raised eyebrows in a family that, for generations, was driven by pragmatism.
What helped Green succeed, despite the odds, is the robust support that the London fashion ecosystem offers. Throughout his bachelor and graduate studies (completed with the help of scholarships), and after his 2012 graduate collection, he was incubated by Fashion East, an organization that promotes young London fashion design. This came with a small grant that allowed him to buy fabric and sponsored his first standalone runway show, in 2013, as well as the two that came after. Subsequently, Green applied for sponsorship at NEWGEN, another London organization, which sponsored six of his London shows, and received help from Alexander McQueen’s Sarabande Foundation (that McQueen also came from London’s working class is not lost on Green). Those years of support allowed Green to build what would become the backbone of his successful wholesale business, which would eventually let him strike out on his own.
That sense of support and community has become central to Green’s work. When he thinks of uniforms, he thinks not of the pageantry of a military parade, but of the uniforms’ leveling effect. “A lot of people see uniforms as oppressive, but I find them democratizing,” says Green. In his graduate collection, he fused religious and working-class uniforms, highlighting the fact that these groups wear uniforms in the service of others. He was attracted by “that kind of beauty and simplicity of the construction, and the idea of the group; the workforce. I’m not against the individual, but I like the idea of belonging.”
Green recalls how in high school, the uniformed kids didn’t pay attention to how they dressed, except on the days they were allowed to make a small donation to charity in exchange for dressing however they liked. On those days, it was evident which kids were poor, because even if they could afford to make a donation, they were ashamed of their regular clothes and so wore their uniforms while the more well-off flaunted new sneakers.
The sense of dignity that uniforms provide is apparent in Green’s own designs. They offer a mix of protection, both physical and spiritual, by way of concealment. This is equally apparent in the looks he puts out on the runway, where many models are enveloped in the clothes and also in the garments themselves. Green’s quintessential piece is a quilted jacket with four pockets, fittingly called “the workwear jacket.” Its padding has that protective effect, but what elevates it from apparel to fashion is the amount of detail — the weighted string belt, the piped seams; the way the side pockets are constructed over the jacket. It’s this type of detail that the wearer — at least this wearer, anyway — will marvel at even after weeks of wear.
This is the kind of stuff that has garnered Green his fan club and industry praise. Though he has put on only two shows in Paris, the ground zero of fashion, they have each caused a surge of that in-the-know excitement that is reserved for a designers’ designer; and with the likes of Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli, Michèle Lamy, and Walter Van Beirendonck in attendance. “I’ve been fortunate to follow Craig Green’s career right from the beginning,” says Imran Amed, the founder and editor of T Business of Fashion. “The first time I went to see him in his studio, I arrived and found that he was operating in a shared space, had only one team member, and one small work table where all of his designs first came to life. Since then, a lot has changed, of course, but one thing that has remained the same is Craig’s focus and hard work. He is curious and is always seeking new ways to push his creativity forward, but is mindful of the business he is building, too.”
Still, I wondered about the challenges Green must be facing. But when I asked, he dodged the question in his characteristically unassuming manner. In lieu of a challenge he offered that on some level it used to be easier when he was more limited by lack of funds, and he had to stick to one fabric and come up with ingenious ways to make it work, whereas today he’s sometimes overwhelmed by the choice of materials available. A good problem, if there ever was one.
