Taylor Thompson’s debut at London Fashion Week for 5000 is a meditation on home, belonging, inheritance, freedom, faith and the complicated process of becoming. The collection’s starting point came from a question once asked of him: “What is your definition of home?” Thompson’s answer, almost reflexive, was “Home is where the hatred is” — a line from Gil Scott-Heron’s Pieces of a Man, an album he first found in a Soho record-shop bin on his first trip to London in 2013. That contradiction, home as both shelter and the place the damage happens, sits alongside Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, giving Thompson a vocabulary for a question that isn’t academic for him so much as current.
The presentation for SS27 staged that vocabulary almost literally, set inside a listening room built from vintage hi-fi components, so the clothes moved through the same sonic architecture the concept came from. The collection itself stays almost entirely in black, oversized double-breasted coats, wide pleated trousers with a boxy single-button blazer, a mandarin-collar jacket-and-trouser set. A few looks let in texture and pattern against all that black: a high-low skirt in a grey, camouflage-like wash paired with a crisp white shirt and black blazer, and a floor-length gown in the same print trailing behind a fitted black jacket.
Photos by Phillip Raheem
Photos by Phillip Raheem
Photos by Phillip Raheem