With beautiful LED stars that shine from the eyes of his models, Craig Green took us on a beautiful weird flower power trip to the next spring. “It started by thinking about the Beatles,” he said almost apologetic. “As a British person, they are quite a naffle, obvious reference, I know. But strangely enough it was less about their aesthetics than how productive they were in their youth. What they achieved in such a short time was almost a miracle.”
There is always something eluscious and romantic in the collections of Green, much that is bizarre and inscrutable – and then many real clothes with it. This collection, the first he has shown in his London studio since this time last year, had held all that creative tension together in a show that ran a path of sand in Paris.
What represents nostalgia for the psychedelic 60s? Perhaps it will be dressed with spirituality that young people are increasingly forced in terrifying times. The references of Green caught a kind of crazy, stripped Sergeant Peper atmosphere, crossed with the taste for micro-dot freedom floral prints that broke out around the same time. The forms of Green-High-Nekke Shirt Tunics with deconstructed military frogs and strange schedules of flower applications are not such a thing as Throwback costumes. They are a canalization of something, a soft reincarnation.
And what, we asked, were those handkerchiefs taken between different teeth of the models? “Oh, I thought it looked when people looked challenging challenging views – as Ectoplasma came out of the mouth, like a fabric, but also in a strange way like a dog.” And the radiant eye insurance? “We made them from lights that are used in dollhouses,” he offered. “I like to have them as eyes. There were many references to those kinds of psychedelic spirit opening of that time that the Beatles went through when they discovered LSD.”
Green’s shows are usually sesequenced in passages. There was a phase of green pajama dressing, married to huge, surrounded textile arts; A Parkas for conceptual carved (inspired by “dog-coats”); A segment for his brilliant Fred Perry cooperation. Craig Green Parkas and Cagoules have a long-term fan base: these also came out in countless iterations, some tent-like, winding oversized ropes and switches, others layered in such large, simple raincoats. All this served as a lively memory of Green’s talent as a colorist.
Spiritual search apart, another element between the wild very much mind of Green was much more down to earth. “I thought a lot about how as I get older, and as people get older, they want to garden,” he said with a smile. Small knits were spread with flower motifs (a strange coincidental parallel to the sweaters that Jonathan Anderson had in his Dior Men’s Debut). And then, the traditional final: four extraordinary multi-floral, multi-layered printed looks, vibrations with color and, as Green said, inspired by sheets from the 60s.