Dear Shaded Viewers and Diane,
A sinking feeling: if many partake this season in visions of a world where all hope’s gone – the post-truth era as in Matthew Miller’s show notes – Craig Green takes us, verbatim, down into the deep blue sea. It’s a shipwreck, or its relics, but there’s a sweetness to it too – anguish having been replaced almost by a sense of destiny, the peace after the storm. Cradled by the waves are no cheekily striped sailors, nor the sexualised marines we could have met up until a few seasons ago – up until Craig Green came, in fact, to propose a new poetics of masculinity that has been adopted by so many since. It’s fishermen instead, in lavender mist ensembles topped with hats like upturned bowls, tied under their chin with overly long loose ends, and holding on to cylindrical bags like buoys. And frogmen, their uniforms heavy yet soft, with ropes for belts, in mottled wool or boucle, towel-like quilts, or black and velvety like oil. Some come with hoods stuffed to the point that they’ve taken on the shape of safety cocoons, and tubular shoulder straps in pastel shades that look almost organic in their unexpected ruffles, molluscan, or umbilical. Then there are the trademark modular silhouettes not unlike what’s left of the fleet itself, garments parting about the wearer like severed boards, softened and smoothed by salt and sand. The most notable are exquisitely patterned, magic carpets floating at sea, keeping together when direction is lost, brightened with the billowy white ribbons of surrender.
Later,
Silvia
