THE Akira-esque choral soundscape that opens Craig Green’s SS20 show seems to bounce off the mirrored floor of Old Billingsgate Market’s underground tunnels, and what had felt like a crypt comes to life in typically ritualistic style.
The interplay between delicate iconography and regimented leather is a key feature, as looks veer from convincingly organic to unmistakably synthetic.
Models wrapped in kirigami-inspired pieces float by like lanterns, luminous in toxic green, purple, yellow and orange.
Staples of functionality are subverted into purely aesthetic features— less so than in his life raft-cum-puffa jacket Moncler collaboration, yet still in a manner that likely causes palpitations amongst pragmatists/sets hearts aflutter in the fashion community.
Straps are generously applied and primarily ornamental, while the frequent use of translucent fabrics to cover the larger areas of the body, and heavier, deeper fabrics to trace the obscured lines beneath gives the illusion of a road map of the anatomy.
Ancient Japanese visuals are tapped again with a continuation of Green’s Samurai armour obsession, this time reworking the much-hailed Craig Green worker jacket with Nerigawa-style quilted panelling.
It’s old, and it’s new, it’s hyper-practical yet at times practically unwearable, and is all the better for it. Craig Green is quickly becoming the master of dichotomies.
by Charlie Navin-Holder