If you look closely at the tactical vests that so thoroughly fail to protect many of the characters in Ridley Scott’s new film, “Alien: Covenant,” you may notice their distinctive pattern of two-inch-wide vertical quilting. This quilting is the signature of Craig Green, an acclaimed London menswear designer, and was, Green recently told me, inspired by Korean monks’ robes, men’s pin-striped suits, and the costume worn by Kate Bush in the video for her single “Suspended in Gaffa,” from 1982. Janty Yates, the costume designer for “Alien: Covenant,” approached Green after she came across his fall-winter 2015 collection on the racks of Selfridges, in London; coincidentally, Green and his staff had already joked among themselves that the sweaters from that season, which each had a large hole over the sternum, looked like the result of a “chestburster” alien departing its human host. Yates sent samples to L.A., and, after they got the nod from Scott, Craig’s studio produced nearly a hundred and sixty full outfits for the film, including vests, jackets, and skintight body suits, knowing that each would be shredded by some very long claws.
The fabular quality that makes Green’s clothes feel like plausible garb for the interstellar colonists of the early twenty-second century has also endeared them to the pop stars of the early twenty-first. Singers who’ve worn Craig Green on stage include Rihanna, FKA Twigs, and Drake, who in 2015 was photographed in a vest identical to the ones in “Alien: Covenant.” In recent seasons, Green, who is thirty, has sent models down the catwalk wearing Persian rugs scrambled into suits of armor, leather biker jackets sutured precariously together with fluttering ribbons, and hexagonal shrouds intended to resemble houses with mansard roofs; the breadth of his imagination has won him the reverence of the British fashion world. But the basic unit of every Craig Green collection has remained the workwear jacket: robust and boxy, with capacious pockets and functional-looking cinches, usually in blue or black. In any given season, Green might show as many as twenty variations of this item, some so simple that they could be mistaken for the traditional French style made famous by the New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham, others more closely resembling the quilted, panelled “Alien” vest, and others mutated still further. The British artist Sarah Lucas, who is often seen in one of Green’s jackets, described hers to me in an e-mail as “a complex, layered jacket and at the same time very sharp and precise. And for all that still casual and goes with anything. All my usual clobber anyway.” She especially likes the quilting. “I’m a texture perv,” she wrote.
The vintage-workwear boom of the late aughts has not entirely receded, and the workwear jacket, in particular, has become a wardrobe staple for a certain kind of undandyish but well-dressed man. Last fall, the Williamsburg store Gentry rapidly sold out of Cunningham-esque jackets by the ninety-year-old French brand Vétra, while the young brand Bode make fifteen-hundred-dollar one-off work jackets from gaudy vintage quilts. When I met Green one recent afternoon at his studio, in Haggerston, East London (four cramped rooms that he will soon be leaving for a larger space, in the Docklands), I found him gentle and unassuming—apart from when he talked about his workwear jackets. He wants nothing less than to be part of the canon. “If you were building your wardrobe, and you went and bought a pair of brogues from Church’s, and you went and bought a trench from Burberry—if you wanted a workwear jacket, you’d buy a Craig Green one. That’s the aim,” he said.
Green, who wears one of his own jackets every single day, including to weddings, grew up in Colindale, North London. “I’ve always been surrounded by people that work hard,” he told me. “All of my family are tradespeople. My dad is a plumber, my uncle’s a carpenter, my godfather’s an upholsterer. After school, I used to go and help my godfather strip sofas and take out all the staples and pull them apart. He was the first person who taught me how to sew.” As a teen-ager, Green wanted to become a portrait painter, in the mode of Lucian Freud or Jenny Saville, but, while he was taking a foundation course at Central Saint Martins, in 2005, he found himself drawn to fashion. While many of his classmates had dreamed for years of studying at Saint Martins, Green had scarcely opened a fashion magazine in his life, and he struggled with the slinky evening wear of that time. “I was trying hard to do it, but I wasn’t very good at it, because it wasn’t using where I’m from or what my skills are.” He often felt painfully out of place. “On my first day, I was just in a River Island zip-up”—a sweater by a British mall brand—“and blue jeans and skate trainers. And everyone else was really loud and colorful and brave-looking.” Rather than trying to copy them, Green took to wearing a blue cotton jacket made for the deliverymen at the Scotch distillers William Grant & Sons, which he’d bought at a garage sale. “I used to wear it every day to college, because it made me feel like I was going to work,” he said.
Finally, about halfway through the course, he discovered what he now calls “outsider fashion”: designers such as Walter van Beirendonck, Henrik Vibskov, and Rei Kawakubo, of Comme des Garçons. “They weren’t about looking sexy or cool or trendy or any of the things that I thought fashion was at the beginning,” he said. “I realized, Maybe I can draw from my past, draw from my family, do something that’s about me even if I’m not from this world.” For his M.A. collection, in 2012, he encumbered his models with plywood-framed cubes and cylinders, and, the following year, for a catwalk show that drew baffled and derisive coverage from the British press, he bought wooden planks from the home-improvement store B&Q, smashed them up, painted them, and nailed them back together into unwieldy headpieces. His uncle helped out with the carpentry.
When Green was growing up, his relatives generally didn’t wear anything more specialized than jeans and T-shirts to their jobs. Nevertheless, he feels a nostalgia for the idea of the workingman’s uniform. “To me, there’s something romantic about workwear and overalls,” he said. “When you’re wearing that uniform, you’re also striving to escape that uniform.” Green particularly pays loving attention to the functional details of his workwear items. Like heavy-duty denim, all of his jackets are made with felled seams—two overlapping edges folded up so they don’t fray—and bar tacks, a tight zigzag stitch that’s almost as strong as a rivet. Like the pouches on carpenters’ pants, the chest pockets hang freely outside the jacket when they’re weighted down; Green had the idea for them when one of his assistants accidentally sewed a jacket inside out. Harder to justify in practical terms is the profusion of little cords dangling from the sleeves and hems, which look dramatic when the wearer is twirling about on stage, but which others have complained get trapped in car doors. From this season on, Green told me, steel bearings will be hidden inside the cords to keep them disciplined, like the lead curtain weights the Queen has sewn into the hems of her dresses.
When I visited Green, he was four weeks away from his next show, at London Fashion Week Men’s. He has set a high bar for himself: his spring-summer 2015 collection, for which he sent models barefoot down the catwalk with flags flying behind them, famously reduced several members of the audience to tears. Previous experiments with textiles have involved embroidery inspired by Irish pub carpets, and laced rope inspired by gym mats; Green’s latest venture is a kind of trompe-l’oeil cotton that has the appearance of corrugated cardboard; each sheet of fabric, he explained, requires seventy hours of labor. The label has six employees and six interns; in the studio, there was an atmosphere of furious concentration. Even a month out from a show, Green told me, they were lucky to leave the studio before nine o’clock each night. The whole team is in the habit of wearing the label’s workwear jackets every day. “They’re not forced, though,” Green said. “Just encouraged.”
