Craig Green A/W 2019 London Fashion Week Men’s

Mood board: ‘Emotion doesn’t mean weakness,’ said Craig Green backstage after his triumphant homecoming show, presented after a season spent showing as a guest designer on the Pitti Uomo schedule in Florence. London is a city renowned for its eccentricity and humour, with catwalks for A/W 2019 boasting a giant Pikachu, furry monsters and men on springy stilts. Green’s catwalk was more emotive, sensitive and made up of an amalgam of moving and breathtakingly intricate codes, symbols and techniques. ‘I was thinking of a man made of glass, but that idea doesn’t necessarily mean fragility,’ he added. New shapes were added to Green’s workwear and uniform-centric canon – spliced monastic robes in Buffalo check, gauzy tailored trenchcoats, densely crocheted vests and trousers incorporating ‘medieval techniques’ and resembling padded protective ice hockey uniforms, sweeping coats with Japonism landscape prints on the back, hidden from view by front-facing runway catwalk shots. Catwalks looks spliced from a multitude of references and tribal signifiers, to resemble something distinct and new.

Scene setting: Green staged his show within a densely arched underground space inside the old Billingsgate Fish Market on the Bankside of the River Thames. The stark space featured nothing but a white runway and a darkened interior. Like the tartans, tassel head pieces, and diverse references in the collection which ‘mean so many different things to so many people,’ Green wanted his show location to be equally ambiguous. ‘As if the show could have happened at any place, any time,’ he said.

Best in show: The most striking representation of Green’s ‘men made of glass’ came in a series of acid tone looks created from densely knitted pieces of plastic, ruched to resemble bubble wrap or transparent orbs of blown glass.