Saul Nash (Q9097)
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Saul Nash is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Saul Nash |
Saul Nash is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
This week Saul Nash is selling his new collection, Archetypes, in a showroom in the Marais in Paris, a space he’s sharing with his fellow London designer Foday Dumbuya of Labrum. Banding together is a very London thing—specifically, in this case, representing the diverse menswear culture that has grown up in the city over the past decade. (Martine Rose, Grace Wales Bonner, Priya Ahluwalia, and Bianca Saunders are all members of that same surge, as is Labrum, and now the newest designers are Charlie Constantinou and Yaku Stapleton.) “We’re all quite close, London’s designers,” said Nash. “Since I began in 2018, I always felt the support from them. We all move together.”The collaborative London ethos is underpinned by the fact that everyone’s offering potential buyers something different. In Nash’s case, it’s the way he’s moving towards a more nuanced development of sportswear. “When I started, I was really attached to the idea of a tracksuit. As I get older, there’s different ways to wear it. It takes on a new meaning as the seasons evolve.”Nash has taken a look at classic menswear genres like the Harrington jacket, the tailored shirt, the fisherman’s smock, denim—the ‘archetypes’ of the collection’s title. “It’s sportswear worn with what you’d call menswear. This season it was really essential to me to explore what that means within the world of movement. Because I don’t ever want people to feel restrained in my clothing.”The subtleties spring to life close up—and only really when the pieces are worn. There’s the cocooning cut of a hoodie, but it’s also designed to be worn over a poplin shirt. The shirts themselves are cut without shoulder seams, and with elasticated cuffs. You can see how Nash’s built-in construction—raglan sleeves and ergonomic twists in cut—will work for contemporary commuting, cycling, and work. Like him, his followers are growing up. These days, when not performing or working as a movement director, Nash wears Sebago loafers, not trainers. His collaboration with Vibram—in which their athletic soles are hybridized onto loafers—neatly captures the essence of the whole collection.
18 June 2024
Saul Nash reconnected with one of his earliest memories to bring a 30th anniversary celebration of the UK Garage scene to life on his catwalk. “My older brother was an MC in clubs, starting from when I was about five. He was practicing all the time”, he grinned. “I remember our house used to shake! So this season looks at club culture, through the lens of myself. I remember once he snuck me in the rave where they were all going kind of back-to-back on the mic, and I remember just how people would dress up to go out. The flyers always said ‘No hoods, no hats, no trainers’, and for me that was really exciting; how would you navigate that, to dress up sportswear to get in? “Hence: Dresscodes became the name of the collection, demonstrated in another of the innately brotherly runway performances with which Nash lights up the London show scene. Nash’s dancer friends mixed with Garage royalty MC Bushkin from Heartless Crew and the photographer Ewen Spencer, who documented the emergence of the scene (a hero of the designer). The soundtrack, mixed by CKTRL, had Envy on the mic and featured the track “Dubble-Up” by RJ East—Nash’s brother.The dresscodes, though? Nash’s concern is to elevate his LUAS brand, to keep it moving through new material developments as well as the physical movement—enhancing properties inherent in his garments. The most visible symbol of the Garage theme were his signature compression knits, woven with black-and-white images of dancing bodies as if caught by a thermal imaging camera, which were also printed across the legs of nylon pants.The cleverest of his thoughts can only be seen in close-up, though—a collaboration with Sebago. “I used to emulate my brother by wearing loafers. Now these ones are customized with Vibram soles.” An elegantly-coded meeting between classic formality and the trainer world which surely has cult potential.Nash is known, respected and loved for the way he participates in so many cultural communities, creative practices, and collegiate attitude toward helping other London designers raise their games. The fact that he’s a personality brimming with positive energy made it also seem so right that he launched a collaboration with Smiley with this collection. It’s subtly done, black on black. “I didn’t want to do something bright with it, because these are dark times,” he said “But I am a positive person; I wanted to show people that despite everything, yeah, a smile could still help sometimes.”
19 February 2024
On a steamy afternoon in London, a man in a red knitted scuba-suit walked out onto a sandy runway installed at the ICA. “The collection this season is titled Intersections,” said Saul Nash before the show. “It looks at intersections between my parents’ cultures. Looking at it by the sea, and open waters.”Along the anatomically-functional lines of his LUAS brand, Nash is mapping out the continuous narrative of his mixed heritage and identity as a Londoner. This season, the beach-y turn of his ‘laid-back’ collection was both a practical proposition, and a meditation on a visit he made to Mauritius. The island nation in the Indian Ocean is home to his father’s father, who belongs to the Hindu faith. “I didn’t grow up with so much of my Mauritian side, but when I went, I noticed how many intersections there were between the cultures—the music is very similar, the kind of melting pot of cultures felt familiar.”Nash found he was discovering the Indian part of his heritage for the first time. “I guess not growing up with that identity until I went to Mauritius, I didn’t really understand that part about myself.” On his Guyanese-born mother’s side, there’s the Caribbean culture of Barbados, where she was brought up before coming to London. The connections between these geographically far-flung islands flowed into his collection. “I realized that these elements shaped the cultures I have known—and they were formed by people migrating throughout the world.”Look hard, and you can discern an abstracted global map engineered into the contours of the ocean-blue compression top, six looks into the show. Shorts, swimming trunks, his signature tracksuits came in sun-bleached colors and marine blues, as well as a couple of towels flagging his logo.“I started to think about myself in Mauritius. You go, dressed almost like you’re from London. You feel connected to the culture. But then, you look slightly like a misfit, or slightly different. And that’s what I quite liked. This idea of outerwear jackets mixed with swimming trunks, as if you’ve just come out of the pool, and throw something on. Everything’s always anchored in my London identity, so when we have a lot of swimming references; references to sailing or nautical uniforms, it’s caught in quite a sportswear way.”The connective sea-theme played visibly through flying-fish appliqués and the sailor collar crossed with a hood on a shell suit.
Nash pointed out the pixelated print on that look—the place where his homage to his Indian heritage has landed. Inspired by the Hindu temples he saw in Mauritius, the image is of the river goddess Ganga. Last summer, he made a similar bow to Mama Wati, the mermaid deity recognised with various names across many Caribbean, Latin American, and African societies. As pragmatic as LUAS may be, spiritually-connecting currents always run through it.
13 June 2023
When Saul Nash designs, it’s with one eye on cutting patterns, and the other on social patterns, and since last winter, he’s been thinking a lot about functional cold-weather clothes. “It kind of dawned on me that a lot of the people that I grew up around—and me—wear ski-garments, but we’ve never learned to ski.”His show is what it would look like for a young Black designer to reappropriate a technical sportswear category, and engineer it for his peer group. Or, as Nash put it more philosophically, “I’m exploring where I’m coming from, and where I’m going to. What would it have been like if me and my friends had skied?” He added, “It was also looking at this idea of aspiration, because a lot of the brands that would sell ski wear or padded garments are selling a lifestyle of aspiration—or almost a dream.”Nash devised a liminal mountain scene with piles of black sand on the runway, and his models came on shivering, beating their hands together, and giving an abstract choreographed impression of skiing or snowboarding.“The colors were drawn from many types of mountains, in many different moments,” said Nash, meaning pale blues, through teal and grays, with a splash of volcanic black and red. As a city-dweller, he was also inspired by the landscape photography of the Swiss artist Thomas Fletchner II. “I looked at his work on running lights through mountains, and that informed the mountain-ridge body-mapping I wanted to put into my garments.”Since winning the Woolmark Prize last year, his technical knowledge and problem-solving around the best strategies for garment longevity and carbon impact have come so far, he could lecture on the subject. In this collection, he wanted to move further away from oversizing. “It was interesting to do that, moving closer to the body, but without losing the movement and adaptability of my designs.”It’s hard to distinguish these subtleties on a runway, but the visual stand-outs were the thermal body-suits and leggings, and the continuation of the knitted tracksuits, all in beautiful tones of blue.
20 February 2023
Saul Nash has had so much to celebrate in the past few weeks—winning the Woolmark Prize and receiving the Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design from the Duchess of Cambridge in quick succession—that the title of his spring collection might easily be Jumping for Joy. “The award was a beautiful thing to receive, especially so close to the Queen’s Jubilee, because a lot of my friends danced in the Jubilee concert at Buckingham Palace,” he said at a preview at his studio at Somerset House. Those friends included “the child I cast in my last show,” he added. “There was break-dancing and roller-skating, which really showed the broadness of London, which you wouldn’t expect from the royal family.”The lookbook Nash has released for spring celebrates the idea of pairs of siblings—a series of photos of the people he regards as family, whether blood relatives or chosen ones found through his interconnected web of relationships growing up in the London ballroom scene, being a teenage MC, becoming a fashion student, a sportswear designer, dancer, choreographer, and movement director for fellow designers and videos.Besides all that, he cooks! Nash said he’d had everyone—including the child dancer and his brother—around to his house, and slow-cooked them a Guyanese chickpea curry from his mother’s recipe on the day of the shoot. Then they all went out into the summer suburban London streets in his collection and the photographer Ewen Spencer captured them jumping—a device to evoke the sensation of technical lightness in the clothes which also captured something of the gentle unison of feeling that makes Nash’s work so moving. “I’m always conscious of sensitivity. Sensitivity sportswear.” Nash reflected. “There's always a sensation ofairand a delicate language. That’s really important for me.”There’s a pixillated blown-up photo print of Nash and his elder brother as children on one of his aerated jackets. “It’s recycled polyester, and it’s based on the AIREX jackets which were really specific to that time in the early 2000s. My brother was really into garage and drum ’n’ bass when I was little, and then in the early 2000s, grime started in London as a street alternative, and he introduced me to that,” he remembered. “Which is why it’s such an honor to work with Ewen Spencer. I came across his books documenting the rave and grime scenes when I was at Central Saint Martins. To have someone like that who really understands my references is special.”
13 June 2022
Movement, meaning, technical innovation and the cultural canon of sportswear coalesce uniquely in Saul Nash. His brand is LUAS—first name spelled backwards—and in his collection, shown on screen and on London’s runway, his friendship group of dancers and models laid down new layers of his progressive and soulful abilities.“My Caribbean heritage always has to be seen through the lens of someone who grew up in and who lives in London, and in an everyday context,” he said at a preview. This comes from a young Black man—an alum of the Royal College of Art—who is exerting the commonality of his lived experience into a focused, long-term design mission. “When I was young, I used to go to the theater,” he remembered, “and I was looked down on for wearing a tracksuit.”Shame on the British white arts establishment for the unwelcome of that casual racism to a talented youngster who had discovered his fluency in dance at high school. Nash has gone on to become a multi-faceted choreographer, movement director and designer who is centered on placing a generation’s entry to all spaces with their identities and ways of dressing held high.The thinking behind Nash’s fall collection formed while he was reflecting on how he experienced his Guyanese second-generation identity as a young Londoner—while also developing his technical know-how as a finalist in this year’s Woolmark Prize. Conceptually, it entwined the spiritual lines of folklore and Christian church-going he learned with family—and his trips to the barber shop. “I asked myself, ‘When do I find connections with that culture?’ It’s when I go into a barbershop, because many of them are Caribbean-owned,” he said. “It’s the place where you’d hear the music and wait looking at walls lined with flags of the Caribbean.”Those memories were exercised in the color and blurry green prints (signaling the flag of Guyana), and the iconography of mermaids on some of his tracksuits—subtle salutes to the powers of the deity variously recognized across many societies in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America as Mami Wata, Watra Mama, Mohana, La Sirena or Yemanyá. “From my grandmother, aunties and uncles—those stories never left the family, even though I never went to Guyana myself,” he said. “My challenge was, ‘Where does the story fit into the sports language?’”
18 February 2022
It was back-to-school day for London Fashion Week in more ways than one. After such a long hiatus from physical shows, Saul Nash was the first designer to present on an official runway here in a year and a half with a show themed around his memories of going to school in North London. Rough video footage of teenagers in a playground played immersively on the walls; a diverse bunch of teenage boys, exactly like Nash’s old school mates, congregated around a couple of London bus stops, and so it began.“Not so long ago, my mum sent me a box of my old school stuff, with my records and my last-day-of-school shirt,” said Nash. Opening it, a wave of nostalgia made him want to piece together what his school uniform had meant to him and his friends—the rituals, the teen sub-fashions of 2009, the subversive tweaking of regulation garb. Fragments, as the collection is named, came out of the memories he said he’d put behind him; it was cleverly staged around the universal observation of what happens on the way to and from school—that thing of teens surreptitiously performing quick changes at bus stops, customizing their own rules and group identities into clothes that defy the codes that school authorities futilely construct to make everyone look the same.There were fragments, too, in the sense of Nash’s integration of adjustable, transformable segments and magnetic fastenings into his blend of sport, performance, and fashionwear. His first trench coat, in acid yellow deadstock nylon, has detachable “bomber” bolero sleeves; a couple of boys changed into reversible nylon cagoules, plain on one side and printed with splashy motifs on the other. Nash pointed out they were warped images of the Oyster travel cards, given by the London transport authority to school-age children when he was young, which are now under threat of being taken away.And there was a rubber key ring with a personal symbolism: “A nod to my Bajan and Guyanese heritage, and growing up in London trying to connect with these cultures in this city,” he said. “I also linked that to Fragments because we have these ties with countries we’ve never been to; so everything is kind of fragmented, the colors distorted.” His brand speaks to a generation that collectively went through the same experiences at school and relate to how Nash transforms those experiences into a sensitive portrayal of masculinity and friendship.
This season fans will enjoy his backward logo LUAS on soccer socks and his morphing of do-rag and school cap. At the end of the show, Nash ran out wearing the same blue school shirt on which his classmates had scribbled messages on the last day of term at Winchmore High School. They should be inviting him back as an inspirational alum: Proof to the next gen of teenagers that even rebelling against hated school uniforms can be a creative act that might lead to some very inspiring careers.
17 September 2021
Please watch Saul Nash’s video before reading one more word.There. If you never come back to this attempt to put his film into words, no matter. Because whoever you are, you’ll have felt it and will not forget it. Which is much, much more than enough for a young emerging designer like Nash to have conveyed about his intention. Then again there’s no one like Nash, who as well as being a sportswear designer is a dancer, choreographer, movement director for other designers, and leader and spokesman for the gentle brotherliness of his young, misjudged peers.All this is exercised wordlessly in the video he namedTwist,made with filmmaker FX Goby, Nash’s partner. It starts with a group scene of boys, in which the central two are head-to-head, gesticulating in each other’s faces. “Making this, it’s about many of the things I’ve been through myself. Often, when you see men in groups, there’s a preconceived idea of what you think of them. You don’t ever see the nuances and the in-betweens. So I wanted to evoke this twist in the film, where you expect one thing about these people, but through watching the film further, your ideas about them are completely lifted,” Nash explains. The twist in the tension is that the two men, instead of hitting or pulling knives or guns on one another, begin kissing. It’s a long, tender, and beautiful kiss. “You think there’s going to be an altercation, but what it’s building up to is a moment of love. Two men kissing is quite taboo where I come from,” says Nash. “So to see the friends around them accepting it and embracing it was the key to it.”Nash grew up in North London and went to a school “where there were Turkish boys, Black boys, white boys. I wanted them to feel like everyday people. I’ve come to realize a lot of my work evokes feelings about the men I grew up among,” he says. “I want to spread the word: Don’t judge a book by its cover. There’s been a lot of men around me who have subverted my idea of what they would think of my sexuality.”The “book covers”—his clothes—are an evolution of the ergonomically designed sportswear he’s been developing through his master’s degree at London’s Royal College of Art and three subsequent seasons under Lulu Kennedy’s Fashion East incubator shows. Now he’s out on his own and has been awarded a six-month residency with studio space at Somerset House. “Yeah, I’m really happy.
I feel like there’s an overarching spirit, that when something could go down the drain, the spirit picks us back up and makes sure we get through,” he says.As a dancer, he applies his inside knowledge of performance to transformable constructs by inserting ventilation zones and quick-release zippers for bodies in action. In his mission to elevate the canon of sportswear as functional and desirable fashion, he is also tending to the environmental problems inherent in using synthetics. He’s introduced organic cotton and is replacing microfiber-releasing materials “as much as I can,” using technical, branded fabrics such as Primaloft, “which is partially made from recycled materials,” he explains.Taking responsibility for saying things that empower social good, as well as working to mitigate ecological impact, is Saul Nash all over. He’s bringing forth a message and a practice within his work that—with the men he casts and the cohort of Black British creative friends involved in the production of his films—resonates far further than London. “Yes, I grew up in London, but it’s a universal story. I think it should speak to any man in cities all over the world,” he reflects. “There are parallels that draw into one another everywhere.”
19 February 2021