Since debuting his first collection in 2013, Craig Green has set out a vision of tactile tenderness. His sculptural constructions, already regarded as a lynchpin of London’s new school of fashion, can appear as a form of psychic armor that absorbs bad vibes and metabolizes it into empathy. Green’s eponymous brand is routinely associated with menswear, but his shapes, moreso even than gender agnostic, are a recontextualization of the body itself, amorphous silhouettes that prod at the conception of how the body occupies space, suggesting a new way to move through an uneasy world.
Green, who is 33 and grew up in North London, speaks softly about his work, which belies its potency. His garments are embedded with a certain pathos, adorned with a penumbra of straps, a balance of utility and ornament—workwear jackets made from tarpaulin and cashmere shifts lined in plastic—resulting in forms that are at once impenetrable but also vulnerable. This can be startlingly affecting; attendees at his debut runway show, a melancholic procession of monochromatic asceticism, were reduced to tears. Green often mentions “tradition” even if such staidness doesn’t readily appear in his clothes; you have to know the rules, as is so often said, to shatter them. His clothes resist typecasting, and are as likely to find fans among the cerebral curation of Dover Street Market as in a streetwear context.
This year, Green debuted the first flourishes of a collaborative relationship with adidas, his largest market incursion to date. The initial styles, Green’s Kontuur I and Kontuur II, take familiar adidas silhouettes and further evolve them, as though pushing the shoe’s photonegative through the visual plane. The successive set, called the Polta Akh II, expands on this dimensional-breaching quality, splicing adidas’ classic shapes into vaporous overlays that conjure a more romantic ideal than is typically found in sneakers, what Green describes as communing with “these ghosts of the past.”
