Last June, British designer Craig Green opened up his London studio to show his latest collection after a two-year absence from the runway. He admitted that such an intimate show was scary – ‘It’s like someone painting a runway through your house,’ he said – but it also felt liberating. Here was the site of Green’s fashion experiments, a creative lab of endless enquiries into fabric and material; all that intricately moulded leather, the glimmering candy wrapper-like fabrics, or the various constructions designed to hang off the body like contemporary sculpture. In the past decade, these have evoked sails and lilos, medical equipment and horse-riding stirrups, even contorted dummies used for martial arts practice.
For this show, his S/S 2025 offering, Green felt like a designer in full flight, riffing on archetypal menswear garments in imaginative style: a series of ‘biker jackets’ were made in collaboration with Danish leather brand Ecco and constructed in colourful jigsaw puzzle-like layers of ‘shooting and protective patches’. The resulting pieces were strange and seductive, the result of hours of experimentation and meticulous assembly. ‘The childish idea of taking an engine apart to see how it works,’ Green said of his process, which is one of enquiry and curiosity. Walking back out of his studio into London’s Docklands – currently in its own state of reinvention, surrounded by looming cranes and construction sites – the excitement for his return was palpable.
