Craig Green’s Stranger Things
The Cult British Designer and adidas Collaborator Is All About Uniforms, Ghosts, and Welcoming Restrictions
- Interview: Max Lakin
- Photography: Jack Davison / Portrait, Amy Gwatkin / Backstage, Dan Tobin Smith / Campaign
Since debuting his first collection in 2013, Craig Green has set out a vision of tactile tenderness. His sculptural constructions, already regarded as a lynchpin of London’s new school of fashion, can appear as a form of psychic armor that absorbs bad vibes and metabolizes it into empathy. Green’s eponymous brand is routinely associated with menswear, but his shapes, moreso even than gender agnostic, are a recontextualization of the body itself, amorphous silhouettes that prod at the conception of how the body occupies space, suggesting a new way to move through an uneasy world.
Green, who is 33 and grew up in North London, speaks softly about his work, which belies its potency. His garments are embedded with a certain pathos, adorned with a penumbra of straps, a balance of utility and ornament—workwear jackets made from tarpaulin and cashmere shifts lined in plastic—resulting in forms that are at once impenetrable but also vulnerable. This can be startlingly affecting; attendees at his debut runway show, a melancholic procession of monochromatic asceticism, were reduced to tears. Green often mentions “tradition” even if such staidness doesn’t readily appear in his clothes; you have to know the rules, as is so often said, to shatter them. His clothes resist typecasting, and are as likely to find fans among the cerebral curation of Dover Street Market as in a streetwear context.
This year, Green debuted the first flourishes of a collaborative relationship with adidas, his largest market incursion to date. The initial styles, Green’s Kontuur I and Kontuur II, take familiar adidas silhouettes and further evolve them, as though pushing the shoe’s photonegative through the visual plane. The successive set, called the Polta Akh II, expands on this dimensional-breaching quality, splicing adidas’ classic shapes into vaporous overlays that conjure a more romantic ideal than is typically found in sneakers, what Green describes as communing with “these ghosts of the past.”
Max Lakin
Craig Green
How did adidas Originals by Craig Green begin?
We started the discussions about a year ago. The prospect of working with them was very exciting from the beginning, because it's a brand I grew up with and a brand I respect a lot.
Had you been looking to do something this high profile, in terms of exposure, and in a design sense, with an athletic trainer, neither of which you’ve done before?
I guess for any brand footwear is really important, and we haven’t yet launched our own footwear line, so to work with someone like adidas, and work with their ability and also their archive knowledge, was really exciting. Doing footwear, and doing sportswear trainers, opens you to a different kind of audience than what we do within our RTW collections, or that we do with other collaborations.
The Kontuur I and Kontuur II reinterpret existing adidas models—the Kamanda and the Ozweego. What about those silhouettes appealed to you?
We're a textile-based brand, because that's what I studied, so, you always start with that. Especially with the Kamanda, it's a rare sole because it's a full 360 [degree] texture, from the base to the side. For the second drop, we did a kind of armored Kamanda, bringing the texture of the sole up to cover the whole shoe, as if the whole shoe was a sole. And that's what we had in mind working with the Ozweego, as well. The shoe is actually created in one piece of molded suede construction. That padded form was directly inspired by what was happening on the Ozweego sole. It's quite difficult with trainers, because it's a market that's so much about collaborations and so many different iterations of toolings and soles, but we thought this approach was significant.
Designers have reinterpreted these models previously and there's no shortage of designer sneaker collaborations, but beyond the co-branding, you don't really pick up the collaborative influence. These though really do look like a Craig Green shoe.
The whole thing was really focused around the textile. The second drop, which is two kinds of classic, iconic adidas shoes overlaid on one another, like there's a ghost of one on top of the other, is done through a process of layering foam and printed Lycra, and then applying a shiny transparent overlay, that is also molded—four different processes within the upper of the shoe. We thought it was interesting that you had elements of these classic styles that were like ghosts of the past. With the shoe where it's got the full Kamanda texture over the top, we developed a process of a fabric that's printed and then the Kamanda texture was molded onto the fabric, so you can see the print beneath the transparent texture. It almost looks like scales.
Do you appreciate working with restrictions? A shoe has to look like a shoe, right?
I mean, I guess the human foot never really changes, and the way people walk and stand doesn't really change, either [Laughs]. So, it's an exciting problem to solve, to find ways to do something new with a shoe. And it's such a specific way of just focusing on one style of garment, which I like, as well. I think it's exciting to work within those restrictions. There are processes and technology that you can't really apply to apparel. It's like a mini sculpture. There's a solidness with footwear.
The Kontour has a more muted palette—grays and blacks and dark navy—versus the Polta Akh II, which explode that palette into a much wider breadth of color.
That was the beginning of what we were referring to as the ghost concept. It was two different shoes because we were using both a Boston and a Samba, And I thought it would be interesting to combine them to see elements of them both. I think it's interesting that adidas still applies the three stripes to different silhouettes and although the angle of the stripes change, or the proportions of them change, depending on how you look at it, you either see one shoe or the other. The first drop was really about almost making a shoe that looks not like a shoe. It looked like something that you'd mold from a cast, because there's this one seam running down the back. The next drop for SS20 was still working with molding and a 3D element on the upper, but overlaying and playing with transparency.
What are you interested in exploring?
I think what's exciting about each season with adidas is that we work with different bases and different sole shapes that we can interpret in a new way. I like the problem-solving process and working with the adidas team, they have so much knowledge in that area and so much ability that anything feels possible. I think the first season and the AW20 season that we just showed were both really focused around using the adidas icons and re-materializing them, or changing the process of how they're viewed—working with classics and then twisting them. But now, we're experimenting with different shapes and different ways of interpreting the existing shoe upper that maybe hasn’t been done before, pushing it a little bit more. More abstract.
Where do you find inspiration?
The Craig Green brand has always been about uniform and functionality. Sometimes it goes very extreme and then sometimes it's more approachable, but it always starts with those beginnings. I've always been interested in uniforms as an idea. I like that they look like they do something, whether or not they actually do. Like in our quilted worker jacket, which has become a brand signature item. There's strings and cords. Some of them are functional, and other ones do nothing at all. But they look like they could do something. We always play with those kinds of ideas and language.
This idea of uniforms is interesting because there's a freedom in that, right? It certainly is present in your main line, but also in your collaboration with adidas, which is one of the most worn brands in the world, and so is its own kind of uniform with its own rigidity. I wonder if you see that as a kind of freedom.
I think uniforms can sometimes make things more equal and be quite inclusive or democratic, because if you're both wearing the same thing, you focus more on the person. It goes back to being in school uniform days, I guess. As soon as it came to wearing your own clothing, one day a year, that's when everyone wore their coolest outfits. And it created a hierarchy between who was rich and who was poor. And then people are being judged in a different way. We were always trying to rebel and wear things that were not part of the uniform. But some people at my school, when they had the opportunity to wear their own clothing, they still wore the school uniform. They would rather wear the uniform than the clothes they owned. Having that kind of uniformity is protective.
Do you like that it's not fixed? I mean there is that ambiguity and that creates tension, which is important.
I think it's really important. I think it allows the process of developing something where the process is designed to have energy. It’s the same with adidas: maybe we'll start off with something really extreme. And then we'll pull it back because we want it to look like an icon, and then we'll be like, "Oh, it's too simple," and then we'll make it even more abstract. There's always that back and forth between what we make.
There’s an idea I think is a through-line in all your designs, of volume and space, and specifically, the body in space and the body taking up space. It’s a paradox, because there's all this volume, but it works to shut the body inwards, to close it off. It's two ideas at once: announcing itself and trying to hide.
There's always two aspects that are fighting between each other. And in this way, sometimes the collections are more approachable, sometimes it's about pure fantasy. What you're referencing is that we also like the idea of the push and pull between restriction and freedom and that kind of thing. Being encased in a volume, whether it be padded or just a full body covering, is protective. Also it's restrictive. I like how different people look at the same thing but they feel something else for it. I think that's always interesting. You don't get as many different kinds of points of view if you tell people exactly what it’s about. In the Moncler collaborations, some people saw it as a space man, and other people saw it as a sex toy. Depends on who the person is [Laughs]. It's always about those extreme opposite ideas fighting against each other, and we land somewhere in between.
Max Lakin is a journalist in New York City. His writing has also appeared in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, GARAGE, The New Yorker, and more.
- Interview: Max Lakin
- Photography: Jack Davison / Portrait, Amy Gwatkin / Backstage, Dan Tobin Smith / Campaign
- Date: July 2, 2020
