With dazzling LED stars shining from his models’ eyes, Craig Green took us on a beautifully weird flower-power trip into next spring. “It started by thinking about The Beatles,” he said, almost apologetically. “As a British person they’re quite a naff, obvious reference, I know. But weirdly, it was less about their aesthetic than how prolific they were in their youth. What they achieved in such a short time was almost a miracle. Otherworldly.”
There’s always something elusively wistful and romantic in Green’s collections, a lot that’s bizarre and unfathomable—and then plenty of real clothes with it. This collection, the first he’s shown since this time last year in his London studio, had all of that creative tension, held together in a show which walked out on a path of sand in Paris.
What does nostalgia for the psychedelic ’60s represent? Maybe it chimes with the spirituality young people are increasingly compelled by in terrifying times. Green’s references caught a kind of wonky, stripped-away Sergeant Pepper vibe, crossed with the taste for micro-dot Liberty floral prints that broke out around the same time. Green’s shapes—high-necked shirting tunics with deconstructed military frogging and odd schemes of floral appliqué—aren’t anything like throwback costumes. They’re a channeling of something, a gentle reincarnation.
And what, we asked, were those handkerchiefs gripped between several of the models’ teeth? “Oh, I was thinking it looked like when people used to fake exorcisms—like ectoplasm coming out of the mouth, like a fabric, but also quite like a dog, in a weird way.” And the shining eye-gear? “We made them from lights that are used in doll-houses,” he offered. “I think it’s quite nice to have them as eyes. There was a lot of references to that kind of psychedelic mind-opening of that era the Beatles went through, when they discovered LSD.”
Green’s shows are habitually sequenced in passages. There was a phase of Green-ized pajama dressing, married with huge, fringed textile art neckpieces; one for conceptual cutaway parkas (inspired by “dog-coats”); a segment for his brilliant Fred Perry collaboration. Craig Green parkas and cagoules have a longstanding fanbase: these too came out in myriad iterations, some tent-like, swinging oversized ropes and toggles, others layered in as great, straightforward rain jackets. All of that served as a vivid reminder of Green’s talent as a colorist .
Spiritual questing apart, another element amongst Green’s wildly allusive thoughts was much more down to earth. “I was thinking a lot about how as I’m getting older, and as people get older, they want to garden,” he said with a smile. There were little knits scattered with floral motifs (a strangely coincidental parallel to the sweaters Jonathan Anderson had in his Dior men’s debut). And then, the traditional finale: four extraordinary multi-floral, multilayered printed looks, vibrating with color—and, as Green said, inspired by ’60s bedsheets.
