Nine years ago Japanese designer Jun Takahashi presented his Undercover menswear S/S 10 collection during Pitti Uomo in a very special location - Florence's Boboli Gardens. At the time Takahashi accompanied the show with a live performance in which he built from scratch one of his magically eerie dolls that he called "Graces".
Yesterday evening there was once again an aura of mystery hanging around the gardens as Craig Green, one of the guest designers of the Pitti Uomo event, opened his show with what looked like a recreation of a crime scene.
The silhouette of the second model who walked down the "pathway" was surrounded by what looked like a wooden structure outlining his body that called to mind the chalk line an investigator may draw around a corpse at the scene of a brutal homicide.
The inspiration actually came from a photo Green saw that showed a woman walking in the street, the light in the image creating a strange halo around her, reminiscent of the ominous chalk outline in a crime scene.
The opening looks also referenced clinical environments, with tops and pants in pale colours but with blood red drawstrings creating decorative motifs that once again traced the outline of the models' bodies.
There were further references to the medical, clinical and forensic moods in the ankle-length parkas, raincoats and workwear based on utilitarian uniforms (was this a way for Green to indirectly reference Florentine painter and sculptor Ernesto Michahelles, better known as Thayaht, who designed the "tuta", functional T-shaped overalls? After all some of the shoes in Green's collection also looked very similar to Thayhat's classic leather sandals...) donned by cleaners, police officers, postmen and surgeons.
This was a bit of a bizarre coincidence as Takahashi's S/S 10 collection presented here featured pieces inspired by uniforms in high-tech fabrics and green trousers that instantly made you think about a surgeon's attire.
According to Green these characters in his fashion narrative represent ordinary saviours with the potential of turning into angels, that's why he decided to overprint their uniforms onto his own garments. In some cases, though, his imprints of clothes such as vests and aprons looked rather eerie, as if they were ghost garments that were haunting Green's designs.
Green also employed tie-dye effects by priting layers of fabrics and then moving them in different directions, creating an imperfect faded effect as shown by the last industrial tunics reminiscent of Green's trademark tabard-shaped designs that were covered in this case with blurred images evoking Vincent Van Gogh's "Starry Night" or reproducing the image of an angel with a horn that was actually not hinting at an imminent apocalypse but at the possibility of an afterlife.
Among the highlights of the show there were designs created employing a new fabric, the result of a collaboration with Nike.
Green created indeed a series of multicoloured running garments (in a mix of shapes and colours that called to mind the abstract geometries and bright colours of the Italian Futurists - was that on purpose?) using the Nike Flyknit sneaker fabric and technology.
While these garments showed a research in terms of textiles, they may actually never see the commercial light as they are actually not made for running and the pieces in this event are to be considered as the results of the first stages of a wider project.
Guest designers' shows at Pitti are after all an opportunity to see a creative mind at work in an unusual environment and most times rather than seeing a real collection that you may find in the shops in a few months' time, you actually see at the florence-based trade show a conceptual idea of what a collection may be (remembers Thomas Tait's showcase, for example?).
In the case of Craig Green, it will be a shame maybe if he doesn't take forward some of the concepts explored in this collection. At the same time, rather than focusing on producing commercial pieces, Green should maybe drop out of the fashion circle and pursue more artistic and theatrical projects.
Somehow you feel that his industrail tunics with blurred colourful prints wouldn't look out of place in a modern staging of a classic Greek tragedy, while his ghost garments trapped in utilitarian shells could be used for arty projects about modern workers in today's factories. Hopefully, Green will take the visual art/theatre costume designer path sooner than expected.
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