At the heart of the 5000 SS/27 collection is a question posed to designer Taylor Thompson: “What is your definition of home?”
His answer: “Home is where the hatred is.”
Borrowed from Gil Scott-Heron’s Pieces of a Man, the phrase becomes a starting point for a collection shaped by memory, displacement and identity. Thompson first encountered the album during an early trip to London, discovering it in a Soho record shop around 2013. Years later, having moved from Oakland to London, that memory takes on a new meaning.
The collection draws on three influential works: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity, Scott-Heron’s Pieces of a Man and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. Together, they explore freedom, escape, faith, inheritance and the circumstances that shape who we become.
For Thompson, home is not necessarily a fixed place. It can be shelter and confinement, belonging and exclusion, inheritance and burden. Moving from Oakland to London has made that question increasingly personal: can somewhere become home simply because you have survived there, or is home something we carry within ourselves?
5000 S/S 2027 marks Thompson’s London Fashion Week debut and will be presented at 180 Studios within the Devon Ojas Listening Room, accompanied by a music curation from Zakia Sewell.
Sound becomes central to the experience, functioning as both memory and geography, connecting the places we leave with the places we become.
As the inaugural Paul Smith Foundation x CFDA Designer-in-Residence, Thompson enters a new chapter in London, with the collection reflecting that transition.
5000 is ultimately less interested in defining home than questioning it.
Sometimes home is where we come from.
Sometimes it is where we leave.
And sometimes, it is something we have to build for ourselves.
