5000 Fall 2025 Ready-to-Wear Collection
That was one sophisticated, confident runway debut by Taylor Thompson this afternoon. The Oakland-based designer returned to New York Fashion Week this season with a tighter, exacting realization of his 5000 label.
Thompson titled this lineup “Bootsy” in reverence to the Bay Area colloquialism. “I wanted to push it as a social study rather than just slang,” said Thompson backstage. The idea was to consider the social connotations of the term, which, like most jargon, carries different nuances depending on context and as it evolves over time from a simple word or idiom to a cultural signature and identifier. “Bootsy is…when you’re kind of whack or lame,” said Thompson. At a surface level, think of the way TikTok has positioned the word “cheugy.” This critical use of bootsy, also styled bootsee, calls back to the 1995 song of the same name by Bay Area rapper E-40. But it also, said Thompson, more broadly—and positively—refers to the funk legend Bootsy Collins, whose opulent, flamboyant personal style transformed his name into an adjective.
“I wanted to parallel it to the idea of camp, of something that is so bad it’s good,” explained the designer. This brings us to today. A sense of absurdity presided over Thompson’s looks on the runway. A model wore a slinky ribbon in lieu of a tie, a shirt placket was cut curved, and some models walked out covered in pleated capes to reveal them as trains attached to their suit jackets. Thompson draped volume into the bodices of coats to make them look wrinkled, and sliced open trouser patterns to sew them back as skirts. You can’t see it in these images, but those drapey sheaths on a few of the female models have jacket lapels and buttons on the back. Rather than bad or camp or bootsy, they were Thompson’s most clever and elegant realization of a variety of ingenious riffs on classic tailoring.
Thompson’s intention here was to offer a variety of “funky or off-putting details,” he said. The execution was effective and polished, and realized his goal of giving the word bootsy a cerebral visual interpretation. So much so that this collection was so not camp, so not bootsy, that it looped back around to challenge its own chic seriousness. But past this enjoyable mental merry-go-round, what’s undeniable is that Thompson is a very good tailor, and today he showcased a more mature level of inventiveness than in the past. Finding the sweet spot between a good, novel idea and the limits of one’s skill set is often the crux of ambitious young designers like this one. Thompson doesn’t seem to be encountering this hurdle. What he has in front of him instead is potential.
