For his return to the runway after a two-year hiatus – he last held a show in 2022 in Paris’ Musée de l’Homme and has presented collections via lookbooks in the seasons since – British menswear designer Craig Green returned to London with an off-schedule show in his Docklands studio presented to just 120 attendees yesterday morning (5 June 2024). With the studio cleared out of pattern-cutting tables and machines, a white runway painted across the floor and backdropped by the River Thames through floor-to-ceiling windows beyond, Green admitted after the show that opening up the place he says he spends seven days a week was ‘very scary‘. ‘It’s like someone painting a runway through your house,’ he smiled.
Backstage after the show, he said the collection had begun with a consideration of his late father, who passed away six months prior. ‘I guess you have ideas of what your father will be, and your father has ideas of what you’ll be,’ he said of the starting point of the collection, which once again saw him interrogate the trappings of masculinity – he is perhaps best known for his riffs on workwear – in his expansive, experimental style. ‘It’s not so much a memorial to him, but more thinking about the relationships between sons and fathers,’ he continued.
