‘You have to be fearless’: inside the free-thinking world of Craig Green

On any given day at the east London studio of British fashion designer Craig Green, located in the former Carlsberg-Tetley offices in Docklands, you might find paddling pools filled with water for creating surreal mouldings of suitcases, stirrups or hiking bottles; an experimental shop display, comprising rods of scaffold or enormous hoops, destined for the shop floor of Dover Street Market; or a series of figures working away on tiny glowing eyeglasses, constructed from the miniscule lightbulbs used to illuminate doll houses. You might even encounter a runway show: on a warm June morning last summer, Green presented his S/S 2025 collection in the studio, beloved by the designer for its vast windows that look out towards the Thames and flood the space with light. ‘So much has happened here – it’s like someone painting a runway through your house,’ he said at the time.

After just over a decade in business, Green’s studio remains a space of voracious experimentation – one that harks back to his first runway show after graduating from London’s Central Saint Martins (CSM), which featured sculptural wooden masks and chestplates made from shards of timber as if a garden fence had been smashed into pieces and strapped to the models’ bodies (the A/W 2013 collection was shown as part of Lulu Kennedy’s Fashion East talent incubator). The collection – which featured monastic riffs on archetypal workwear silhouettes – heralded the arrival of a raw, nascent talent, with Vogue’s Matthew Schneier deeming it the day’s ‘standout show’: ‘The scene-stealers were the face-obscuring plywood headpieces, a sort of haberdashery by way of flotsam. But up close, the pieces had real depth.’

‘It was so haphazard in the beginning,’ Green remembers of these early years in business, which were defined by a mood of improvisation and creative chaos akin to his years at CSM. ‘I was reminded of that first show recently. We were going around London – me and my godfather, with my stepfather driving – picking up these smashed fences and going to the show space; it was so chaotic and small. Everything has always been pulled together by friends and favours – I didn’t start thinking about it until ten years in. And I feel like that’s a dangerous thing to start thinking about.’ Dangerous, he says, because there is a temptation towards nostalgia; to view the past through a rose-tinted haze of another time. ‘It’s hard looking back because, in some ways, you only remember the good bits – sometimes I’m like, “Do you remember when it was just four of us, making sculptures in that tiny studio, and we’d make magic happen with just two fabrics? I wish it was still like that”,’ he says. ‘Things always seem magical in the past; you forget how difficult it was. But I think it’s good to analyse what you’ve done, and hopefully use it to progress forward.’

Indeed, Green’s career has been defined by the idea of forward momentum: after graduating from Fashion East (designers typically show for three seasons), he was awarded Newgen funding from the British Fashion Council, secured a studio at the Lee Alexander McQueen-founded Sarabande Foundation, and presented a series of critically lauded collections that saw him pick up British Menswear Designer of the Year at the Fashion Awards in 2016, 2017 and 2018 (prior to that, in 2014, he had won Emerging Menswear Designer of the Year). Green has also been the guest designer at Pitti Uomo menswear fair in Florence – the memorable S/S 2019 show unfolded in the city’s Boboli Gardens at dusk – and undertaken collaborations with Adidas, Grenson, Fred Perry, Eastpak and Moncler, among others (for the last, he guest-designed as part of the brand’s ‘Genius’ initiative, producing highly conceptual collections that evoked inflatable life rafts, sails, flags and tents). In 2023, he was awarded an MBE for his services to fashion.

But the idea of evolution permeates his clothing, too. Often his collections begin with archetypal menswear garments – workwear, uniforms, priests’ vestments, biker jackets, military attire – which are then transformed through imaginative gestures of construction and intriguing fabric choices. These might evoke the glossy exterior of a Quality Street wrapper, or be made up of colourful jigsaw-like layers of leather patches, meticulously pieced together by hand (‘the childish idea of taking an engine apart to see how it works,’ he described of the latter, which was used to make up a series of biker jackets in his S/S 2025 collection, capturing an impulse to de- and reconstruct garments that runs through his work). Ritual, protection and utility are perennial thematic concerns, as is masculinity, which he has approached with sensitivity and softness. After the pandemic, his combined A/W 2023 and S/S 2024 collection saw crash dummy-like adornments loop around the body in a kind of embrace, while his solo debut – a tribe of barefooted wanderers wearing flags on their backs – moved some of the audience to tears. The fashion critic Sarah Mower (a longtime supporter) describes him as ‘a pioneer explorer of masculine emotional and psychological longings and contradictions in the fraught modern world’.

Green grew up in Hendon, a neighbourhood that, despite its London postcode, has the feeling of suburbia, with parkland and rows of semi-detached housing. He went to CSM with the desire to be ‘a painter or sculptor’, largely down to his natural knack for illustration. His family had no connections to the art world – his father was a plumber, his mother a nurse. But they were a family that made things; his mother was also a Brownies and Girl Guides leader and spent much of her spare time on arts and crafts projects, while Green’s stepfather was a carpenter and his godfather a furniture upholsterer (he taught him to sew as a teenager). ‘I started by doing ceramics, printmaking, fine art,’ he remembers of his early days on the art foundation course, but after discovering that the most interesting people in the university’s smoking area were studying fashion, he began experimenting in the medium and ended up on the print pathway of the fashion design BA. In those early years, he felt like something of a creative outsider: ‘Alexander McQueen was the main influence on every student, and every student was doing this ‘dangerous femininity’ with illustrative prints of roses and animals,’ he says. ‘But I was doing these big black boxes. I definitely wasn’t top of the class.’

Even so, he eventually caught the eye of Louise Wilson, the then-head of the CSM fashion MA course, who was known for a fearsome honesty that helped forge the careers of Christopher Kane, Phoebe Philo and Kim Jones, among others. ‘I told my tutor, Fleet Bigwood, that I wanted to apply, and he took me straight to her office, which was terrifying,’ he says. ‘She asked me all these grilling questions, Louise-style. She made me go and watch Valentino: The Last Emperor, and then called me back to ask what I thought.’ (He does not know why she chose the 2008 documentary, though he suspects it was just her fixation at the time.) Dismissing a meticulous portfolio he had designed on his computer, she instead asked to see his drawings and was impressed; later that year, he began the fashion MA course. ‘I went from feeling a bit lost on the BA, not really knowing where I was going and not really fitting in, and then having a really good relationship with Louise,’ he says. ‘I felt she understood what I wanted to do – she helped me realise what was possible, that there was a place for me in fashion.’ (Wilson died in 2014; Green continues to thank her in the notes that accompany each of his collections.)

One thing he remembers from Wilson’s office was a sign on the door that read: ‘I have nothing to say, but I’m saying it anyway. Does this relate to you?’ It is a question that has become pertinent to the designer as he gets older: for one, he is now a tutor himself, leading the fashion department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (previous course heads have included Raf Simons, Hussein Chalayan and Grace Wales Bonner). Spending a week or so a month at the school, and otherwise overseeing remotely, he feels young students think too quickly about the outcome of a project, leaping to the end point and often becoming paralysed with fear in the process. ‘It’s a privilege to be able to talk to young people about their work and ideas, but I have noticed that they are almost self-censoring, which is maybe to do with social media,’ he says. ‘Creativity is not about having one idea, drawing it and then making it – you have to make it, then analyse it.’

It’s a way in which Green himself works: since the pandemic, he has rejected the typical biannual runway schedule, settling into a rhythm where he shows only once a year, which might be in London or Paris. ‘Before Covid, everything was getting faster and more intense. After that, we talked about different ways of showing – presentations, lookbooks. I was like: am I forcing myself to say things creatively? I think a lot of people are trying to do things differently, but it’s hard because there’s a system – and sometimes when you aren’t a part of that system, it can feel like you don’t exist.’

Last June in Paris, on the final Sunday morning of men’s fashion week, Green showed his S/S 2026 collection at the historic Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers on a runway of glowing yellow sand (amid the city’s chiming church bells, the scene had a ceremonial feel). The collection itself, Green said backstage, somewhat reticently, was inspired by The Beatles. ‘As a British person, they’re quite a naff, obvious reference,’ he blushed, but he elaborated that he was less interested in their attire than ‘how prolific they were in their youth. What they achieved in such a short time was almost a miracle’.

Speaking from his studio, a month or so later, he said the idea emerged from playing ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, a 1966 song from the band that he relates to Our Lady Peace’s cover version which plays over the opening credits of 1990s supernatural film The Craft. From here, it was about an ‘idea in reverse’ – taking a familiar reference point (‘they are so much part of the furniture in the UK’), and working backwards (not unlike the conspiracy theory that if you play certain Beatles records in reverse they contain hidden messages). Psychedelics – a nod towards the discovery of the mind-altering possibilities of LSD by The Beatles in later years – were another reference point, figuring in the eyeglasses illuminated with tiny lightbulbs (as if models had surreal glowing eyes), bold amalgams of 1960s florals (gleaned from vintage bed sheets purchased by Green, before being scanned and reprinted), and the colourful handkerchiefs that emerged from models’ mouths. Green imagined the show as a kind of psychedelic journey, with the closing looks – comprising shirting cut into streamers and adorned with a collage of floral prints – being like the season’s protagonist had had their ‘mind widened’.

‘Everyone is obsessed with this idea of nostalgia at the moment,’ says Green. ‘And there is some comfort to familiarity, but also something terrifying, too.’ Further inspiration came from the horror movies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, lending the collection a disorientating undercurrent – one epitomised by the use of ‘harvest yellow’, a colour he sees as encapsulating the era and imbued with an intrinsic strangeness. In looking back at images of the 1960s, he felt there was something ‘creepy in the way [that] everything’s tinted’.

Green’s collections can often feel like a Rorschach test: are these clothes for protection or adornment, celebration or mourning? Are air tubes, wrapped around a parka jacket, for life support, or are they helping you breathe in a distant dimension? Are inflatable tabards meant to evoke lilos or emergency rafts? And, while this might occasionally make a Craig Green collection impenetrable – the designer works by a kind of free association, the logic of which might be only known to himself – his clothes are anything but evasive. Instead, they are immediate, visceral – he doesn’t tell you what to think, they are clothes to make you feel.

In this way, Green is perhaps best viewed alongside the great Rei Kawakubo, whose Comme des Garçons collections require a similar suspension of logic: in her strange, often inexplicable contortions of the body, where reference points are flattened and garments seems to exist outside of time and place, the onus is placed on the observer to make sense of it all. Kawakubo, alongside Walter Van Beirendonck and Bernhard Willhelm, was one of the figures who showed Green that fashion could be something other than just clothes. He has also been compared to Rick Owens, who operates in a similar domain.

‘These designers made me realise that fashion could be from anywhere and be about anything, and that was freeing,’ he says. Indeed, freedom is a word the designer often returns to – for him, creativity requires fearlessness, a space for creativity that must be guarded and sacred (this is helped by working alongside a particularly close-knit studio team, which includes his partner Angelos Tsourapas, who is also the brand’s business director). ‘It’s how everything moves forward,’ says Green. ‘You need creative thought for things to progress, and for new things to happen. You have to have the freedom to make mistakes, to create work and not live in fear.’

This article appears in the October 2025 Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

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