5000: LFWSS27- a meditation on belonging

SøEdited Team
Article: Kellie Neilson
SøEditor-in-Chief: Chris Saint Sims 
​SøFashion Director: Savannah Barthorpe
Photography: Oscar Foster-Kane

For his London Fashion Week debut, Taylor Thompson turns 5000’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection into a meditation on belonging, inheritance and the difficult freedom of becoming someone new.

​There are certain questions that sound simple until you actually have to answer them.
For Taylor Thompson, founder and designer of 5000, one of them was: What is your definition of home?

His answer came through Gil Scott-Heron: “Home is where the hatred is.”
It is an uneasy place from which to begin a fashion collection, but discomfort is precisely where 5000’s Spring/Summer 2027 story takes shape. Presented during London Fashion Week, Thompson’s latest work approaches home not as a sentimental fixed point, but as something unstable and a place of shelter and confinement, belonging and exclusion, love and violence, inheritance and burden.

For Thompson, the question has become newly personal. Having recently relocated from Oakland, California, to London as Designer in Residence at the Paul Smith Foundation. 

Thompson’s arrival in London carries institutional significance too. His first London Fashion Week presentation arrives during a period of geographic and creative displacement. Oakland is the place that formed him. London is the place he has chosen. Somewhere between the two, 5000 asks whether home is something we inherit, something we leave behind, or something we have to construct for ourselves.

That tension runs through the intellectual framework of the collection.

Three works sit at its centre: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity, Gil Scott-Heron’s Pieces of a Man and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. Together, they form an unlikely but coherent emotional architecture for the season.

From de Beauvoir comes the question of freedom: how free can we really be when our lives begin inside circumstances we never chose?

From Scott-Heron comes escape: what happens when the place we return to is also the place capable of hurting us?

And from Baldwin comes redemption, with home tied intimately to faith, family, shame, history and the possibility of transformation.

For Thompson, these ideas are less academic references than different routes into the same problem. We are shaped by where we come from, but we are not necessarily condemned to remain there — geographically, emotionally or psychologically.

That is where 5000’s interest in becoming begins.

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HOME, RECONSIDERED

Fashion has always been preoccupied with reinvention. A new season proposes a new silhouette, a new identity, a new way of presenting oneself to the world. But 5000 pushes at a more difficult question: what has to happen internally before transformation can actually take place?

Leaving home does not automatically free us from it.
Memories travel. So do habits, family histories, belief systems and wounds. Distance can change our relationship to the place we came from without severing it completely. Thompson’s move from Oakland to London becomes, in this sense, more than biography. It becomes a lens through which the collection examines the distance between origin and identity.

Is London home because Thompson has chosen it?
Does Oakland remain home because it shaped him?
Can a person belong simultaneously to the place they left and the person they are becoming somewhere else?

5000 resists giving a clean answer.
Instead, Spring/Summer 2027 moves through a series of contradictions: leaving and returning, freedom and responsibility, inheritance and reinvention. Home can be the place that gives us language, memory and identity. It can also become the thing against which we define ourselves.
Freedom, in Thompson’s world, does not necessarily mean erasure.
It may require confrontation.

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SOUND AS GEOGRAPHY

That idea extends beyond clothing.
The collection’s London presentation takes place at 180 Studios, inside the Devon Ojas Listening Room, with music curated by Zakia Sewell. Sound is not treated as atmosphere alone, but as another form of memory- a way of transporting one place into another.

It is an especially fitting dimension for a collection whose roots reach back to Thompson’s first encounters with London.

Around 2013, during his first trip to the city, Thompson found Gil Scott-Heron’s Pieces of a Man in a Soho record shop. He already knew “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” but discovering the album physically, in London, transformed it into something more personal.

The record became attached to place.
Years later, returning to Scott-Heron for his London Fashion Week debut creates an unexpected loop: London is no longer simply the city in which Thompson once discovered an album. It is now the city in which that album helps him interrogate his own relationship to home.

Music becomes archive and map simultaneously.
A record can locate us in a room, a city, a period of our lives. It can travel with us long after the geography itself has disappeared. In 5000’s universe, sound becomes evidence that home does not always need walls. Sometimes it is stored inside memory.

Taylor Thompson is the recipient of the inaguaral Paul Smith's Foundation x CFDA Designer-in-Residence, Thompson has recieved complimentary studio space by Projekt, as well as mentoring from industry leaders and business planning training, in the center of London after being chosen by a panel of industry leaders. He will be joining the second cohort of 6 UK-based designers; Harri, Joyce Bao, Renata Brenha, Petra Fagerstrom, Masha Popova and Eden Tan. All designers were chosen by their idiosyncratic perspective, design atheistic, focused vision and intent for the program.
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Credits:
 
Public Relations:
Lindsey Solomon- Linsey media
 
5000 Team:
Rodrigo Strazds
Shannae Plummer
Yana Elif Dede
 
Founder and Director:
Taylor Thompson
 
PAUL SMITH FOUNDATION
@paulsmithsfoundation
 
Lookbook Photographer:
Oscar Foster-Kane

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