A roof over the head doesn’t always translate to security and comfort, as Taylor Thompson’s debut presentation for 5000 Lab explores the complexities that attach to the word ‘home’. For some, home is where the heart is, for others it is where the hatred is, but for many it is where both coexist. As we inevitably age our personal perceptions of home is ever shifting to places beyond our childhood roots, it becomes moulded by the people we surround ourselves with and the walls that we build for ourselves. No two experiences or perceptions can ever be the same, and there is both beauty and isolation in that fact as Thompson demonstrates.
Unlike the busy and often crowded nature of a runway show, 5000 presented their collection in a much more intimate and immersive way where clothing and sound become vehicles for memory, movement and reflection. With only 15 attendees permitted at one point and asked to wear paper shoe coverings upon entry, the setting feels oddly cosy yet unsettling with models formatted around the room wearing pieces from the SS27 collection and interacting with the handmade hi-fi sound system. It feels as though you’ve stepped into the living room of someone’s home, a room that feels cosy in size but sterile in grey tones, perfectly capturing the juxtapositions felt by the artists.
Sound is central to the experience of the collection, music having the ability to transport us back to a memory, time and place within our lives, becoming both archive and part of our geography. Music curated by Zakia Sewell aligns with the artist’s own experiences of comfort and destruction being present in the home through the expression of sound. Large speakers combine with the crisp quality of a record player, as the audience’s vision drinks in the looks, whilst the ears soak up the emotionally charged soundtrack.
Sleek tailoring meets streetwear elements to formulate hybrid garments where the bomber jacket and blazer birth an inbetween of the two. Blazers are casually slung over the shoulders of models in a way that eludes both ease and the intent to hide, while muted plaid print sits amongst a palette of greys and blacks ranging from more fitted silhouettes to oversized and loose-fitting. Thompson’s sharp tailoring language is accented with the technical fabric of nylon across the collection in variations amongst the monotonal hues. There is a notable fluidity amid the attires of the models; feminine gowns are polished with trimmings of blazer suit lapels and buttons. Blending tailoring for the genders with pieces that elude the reclamation of power within a concept that can often cause the loss of control.
Sometimes there is no escape nor safety within the home, this contradiction forms the philosophical centre of 5000’s SS27. Drawing from three bodies of work that approach this contradiction from different directions: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity, Gil Scott-Heron’s record Pieces of a Man, and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. Thompson explains on the collaborations: “working together to create a language about what it means to live inside the circumstances that have made you; and what it means to become something beyond them”. All converging to question the feelings of freedom, wanting to escape and redemption in alignment with our experiences of the home and the experience of juxtapositions being built into the floorboards: “Home can be Shelter and confinement. Belonging and exclusion. Inheritance and burden. Love and violence. Faith and doubt. Origin and limitation.”
An entirely unique impression, 5000 uncovers the complicated process of becoming. Not only is the collection a reflection of the brand’s precise tailoring craftsmanship, but it also gives the audience a sense of private comfort in knowing that coming from a dysfunctional home does not make you, even when the ability to walk away from familiarity is problematic at best. We must remember that sometimes home is the family you’re born into, and sometimes it’s the home that we make for ourselves.
