The symbolism came heavy at Craig Green’s spring/summer 20 show on the last day of London Fashion Week Men’s. The floor was a shining mirror — reflecting the brick arches of the subterranean show venue under the Old Billingsgate Market on the bank of the Thames. As the models strode out — to the sound of Q Lazarus’s Goodbye Horses — they too were reflected in the shining surfaces. “Faced with their own image, intense self-study sheds new light on the intricacies of even the simplest forms” the press release stated.
There’s a reflexive poetry that runs through everything Craig Green does. He has his codes, his silhouettes, the laced-up quilted workwear, the ties, the cut-out windows onto the body, the abstracted sculptural pieces; but he has an emotional signature too, that soft thoughtfulness, that surgical precision, that conceptual, playful interest in the body.
Goodbye Horses, which soundtracked the iconic, disturbing dance scene of human-skinning mass murderer Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, was perhaps a dark-humoured nod to Craig’s own obsession with skin this season. The opening looks came in leather, which after all is wearing the skin of something else. Rain coats came printed with images of the body. But it soon grew into less literal territory. There were slithering wisps of brightly coloured plastics, feather-light and papery jackets, lacey anthropological motifs, ribs and spines and crucifixes and torsos, the insides of bodies worn as decorative, mystical jewellery. It was about exposure and protection — a window onto the body reconfigured as a window onto the soul. A ritualistic transformation.
