A photograph of a watch, its face concealed by a specially crafted leather cover, provided the starting point for Craig Green’s S/S 2023 collection first shown at Paris’ Musée de l'Homme in June 2022. ’It was like a watch you couldn’t read,’ he says on a recent call from his London studio. ‘I thought it was a really beautiful thing.’
The watch itself originated from the Second World War, its cover designed to protect the inner workings from the dust and shrapnel of the battlefield. Green insists that the reference – which appeared in the collection as moulded bracelets and chokers, as well as similar covers that sat over neckties or on the chest of a shirt – was not chosen to labour a metaphorical point (though, he concedes, there is probably one there if you look hard enough). Rather, the fascination came from the idea that an object could be stripped of its purpose and yet retain its essence.
