The sonic curation in Devon Turnbull’s OJAS Listening Room was masterminded by Finding Albion author Zakia Sewell at Taylor Thompson’s first London presentation. Admitted 15 at a time into the intimate space, guests absorbed Sewell’s ambient, jazz-inflected edit while contemplating this trans-Atlantic debut for Thompson’s Oakland-born label 5000.
Thompson has been in London since April as the inaugural Paul Smith’s Foundation x CFDA Designer-in-Residence, a year-long placement that comes with studio space and mentorship at Studio Smithfield. “It’s awesome,” he said of working in London’s equivalent of the Meatpacking District, although “if you’re working a little too late at night, it gets crazy… London is full of small labels really trying to make it. And there is a different language here for you to absorb into your own.”
Thompson is a progressive tailor, working to construct a modernist vocabulary from that category’s familiar visual language. He said: “It’s also pushing the ideas of what a tailored silhouette can be.” One long, skirted black double-breasted coat heaped its volume backwards, dropping from the shoulder blades into a fluted flourish above a single vent. A fully canvassed garment with shoulder pads and chest piece retained the internal engineering of traditional tailoring while dispensing with lapels and a conventional front fastening; access came instead through a hidden zip at the back.
Combined with its white-stitched pockets, the result was akin to a minimalist tuxedo. A pale camo skirt flared broadly beneath it, while the accompanying shirt’s button line curved around the torso towards the back in a line Thompson compared to the lapel that convention held should have been above it.
Technical fabrics accented that tailoring language in a suit of washed gray nylon that framed and contained the inserted architecture of an MA-1 bomber. A black variation on the same design held that military-utilitarian template within silky, subtly camouflaged jacquard, worn above Thompson’s take on the hakama pant: deep inverted pleats constructed to hold, just, the discipline of silhouette while allowing for swooshy volume.
A tailored houndstooth gown extended the same logic into conventionally feminine eveningwear, its body constructed around a full corset that centered lapel-like breaks of silhouette at the neckline. The suit worn by Sewell was overprinted with a shadowy, eroded check, its pattern deliberately faded to give the cloth a softened quality mirrored in the hand.
Thompson’s residency will allow him to return for another London presentation next season, “in one form or another.” How his experiences here inflect his forms should be fascinating to observe.
