5000 Spring/Summer 2027: Finding Home Between Oakland, London and the Self

For his London Fashion Week debut, Taylor Thompson’s 5000 explores home as shelter and confinement, inheritance and burden, faith and doubt, and ultimately as something we may have to build for ourselves.

LONDON — For Spring/Summer 2027, 5000 begins with a deceptively simple question: What is your definition of home?

For designer Taylor Thompson, the answer came from Gil Scott-Heron’s Pieces of a Man: “Home is where the hatred is.”

The record has a deeply personal connection to Thompson and to London. He first discovered the album during an early trip to the city around 2013, finding it in a record shop in Soho. What was already an important piece of cultural history became part of his own personal geography of London — connecting sound, memory, place and identity.

For 5000, that memory becomes a meditation on what it means to call somewhere home.

HOME IS WHERE THE HATRED IS

Scott-Heron’s Home Is Where the Hatred Is is written from within addiction, but its deeper resonance for 5000 lies in the contradiction contained within the idea of home itself.

Home is supposed to be a shelter.

It can also be the place where damage happens.

It can be the place you return to, the place you cannot completely leave, and the place where survival and destruction become entangled.

That contradiction forms the philosophical centre of the Spring/Summer 2027 collection.

5000 draws from three bodies of work: 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 create a vocabulary for thinking about what it means to live within the circumstances that have shaped you — and what it means to become something beyond them.

De Beauvoir considers freedom in relation to circumstance and responsibility. Scott-Heron examines escape, repetition and alienation. Baldwin turns toward family, faith, shame, inheritance and redemption.

At the centre is one question: how do we become?

A CONVERSATION ABOUT HOME

What is home?

Where do we find it?

Can home be a place, a person, a memory, a body — or something we spend our lives trying to build?

Thompson’s move from Oakland, California, to London, where he has taken up a position as Designer in Residence at the Paul Smith Foundation, gives these questions an immediate personal dimension.

After leaving Oakland and arriving in London, home becomes less of a fixed location and more an evolving relationship between memory, distance, belonging and identity.

Is London home now?

What does it mean to belong to a place you have chosen rather than one that formed you?

Can somewhere become home simply because you have survived there?

5000 approaches home through a series of contradictions:

Shelter and confinement.
Belonging and exclusion.
Inheritance and burden.
Love and violence.
Faith and doubt.
Origin and limitation.

The collection moves through leaving, searching, confrontation, freedom and return.

Rather than presenting freedom as a clean break from the past, 5000 considers whether freedom might require returning to what came before, examining it and deciding what can be carried forward.

FREEDOM, ESCAPE AND REDEMPTION

The three central references offer different approaches to the same existential territory.

De Beauvoir gives us the question of freedom.

In The Ethics of Ambiguity, freedom is inseparable from the world around us. We are born into conditions we did not choose, yet remain responsible for how we act within them.

Scott-Heron gives us the question of escape.

In Pieces of a Man, the struggle becomes intimate and bodily — expressed through addiction, masculinity, disappointment and alienation.

Baldwin gives us the question of redemption.

In Go Tell It on the Mountain, home becomes connected to family, faith, shame and inheritance. Salvation becomes inseparable from confrontation with family, history and the self.

Between these three perspectives sits the idea of home.

For 5000, growth, freedom and atonement are not definitive resolutions, but ongoing processes.

Sometimes home is the place we come from.

Sometimes it is the place we leave.

Sometimes it is the place we return to.

And sometimes home is something we have to build for ourselves.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND BECOMING

At the heart of the collection is an examination of consciousness — how we understand home and where we locate it within everyday life.

How much control do we have over our own consciousness?

Can we choose to change it?

The existential thinking of Simone de Beauvoir, the writing of James Baldwin and the social consciousness of Gil Scott-Heron provide the framework for this exploration.

Thompson’s movement from Oakland to London creates a new landscape through which to examine the relationship between place, memory, culture and displacement.

5000 becomes a space for self-reflection, asking whether home is something we inherit, something we construct, or ultimately something we carry within our own consciousness.

5000 AT LONDON FASHION WEEK

The Spring/Summer 2027 collection will be presented at 180 Studios, within the Devon Ojas Listening Room in London.

The presentation will feature a music curation by Zakia Sewell, creating a meeting point between sound, memory and the idea of home.

For 5000, music becomes an archive and a geography — a way of locating the self in time and place, and a means of carrying one home into another.

The presentation is conceived not simply as a fashion show, but as an environment where clothing and sound become vehicles for memory, movement and reflection.

TAYLOR THOMPSON’S NEXT CHAPTER

Thompson is the inaugural recipient of the Paul Smith Foundation x CFDA Designer-in-Residence program.

Through the program, he has received complimentary studio space through Projekt, alongside mentoring from industry leaders and business-planning training in central London.

He joins the second cohort of UK-based designers alongside Harri, Joyce Bao, Renata Brenha, Petra Fagerstrom, Masha Popova and Eden Tan.

For Thompson, the opportunity arrives at a significant moment. His transition from Oakland to London is not simply geographical; it becomes part of the creative language of 5000.

The result is a collection that looks backward and forward simultaneously — asking what we inherit, what we reject, what we carry and what we become.

A PLACE TO BUILD

5000 Spring/Summer 2027 resists a simple definition of home.

Instead, it treats home as something unstable, complicated and deeply personal — a place capable of holding comfort and conflict at the same time.

Through De Beauvoir, Scott-Heron and Baldwin, and through Thompson’s movement between Oakland and London, the collection considers the possibility that becoming requires a confrontation with where we began.

Home can be inherited.
Home can be abandoned.
Home can be remembered.