Craig Green. Menswear Spring 2021 - Paris

(Images:  Craig Green.  All credit)

UK fashion designer Craig Green is probably more on the money with his insulated protective styles, which he has been experimenting with for the last four years, obviously not timed or prophetized as an aesthetic necessity in lieu of COVID-19 derailing civilization in less than 11 months of its initial first wave.  But like most designers or otherwise, what has occurred globally, that we have all experienced, is beyond any inspired science fiction story, instead we're living it.  A pandemic which is showing no signs of abating with a slathering of social discord, extremely fragile social and economic systems – it is very hard to see what sort of world will emerge in the years to come.  

Yet, designers are pushing through and like fashion, it holds a testament of possibilities. Green's weather-the-storm styles over the past seasons, particularly his collaboration with the Swiss/Italian mountaineering brand Moncler, have shown his ability to meld the practical with the conceptual, both ensuring a ceremonial imprint of humanist and esoteric concepts of changing environments that the human form must adjust too or perish.  

For his Spring 2021 collection, Green, never one to tone down the masculine, has reinvigorated it in a surreality of preservation  and insulation, yet, he has set it within his balanced symmetrical concepts, he doesn't allow for the offset perspectives that can be found in avant-garde styles.  Rather the equilibrium in his ceremonial influenced designs, offer a metaphysical appeal or maybe even a sociological dilemma of dealing with reality.  To which the human psyche struggles to comprehend. Should we escape from it?  Part of Green's answer lies in his stylizations that are, as mentioned rooted in both the arcane and functional. Head pieces that are balanced via four small counter weights, with the eyes reflecting hanging silver balls, a dulling out of the senses – which can be deceived by the visual  that in most Eastern Religions as a philosophy was a necessity to remove oneself from the burden of suffering and delusion, which in Buddhism is paradoxically also living.  In humanist concepts borrowing from an age old spiritual comtemplation of the Universe and are our place in it, is to humble oneself to its magnificence, yet also to defy it.  To overcome the burden of nothingness, that the human condition suffers from, seemingly isolated within an infinite cosmos.

Green's latest collection attempts to, in its cult like impression, bridging the enigma as a reflection of the self.  Created in the first lockdown all the while England faces a second of COVID-19 isolation, as a complete folly occurred when it opened to fast and frantic for Spring Summer, however in the shadow of the last quarantine, Green's interest in maintaiting his focused and defined cuts have shone through.  The fitting and arrangements for the Spring 2021 lookbook array are excellent, 22 pieces keeping in tune with the ceremonial cultish aspects, there is also a conservative insert of shirting embedded into the insulation of looks.  Green maintains his formalized and regimented color palette.  A superb collection.