From Somerset to Fashion Scout: a young designer, Nathan Slate, debuts a world without nature at London Fashion Week.

Repurposed textiles, a haunting vision of a world without nature, and a debut at London Fashion Week - Nathan Slate invites us to confront what we’ve ignored, and to find poetry in survival.

Fashion often celebrates the new. But for Somerset-born designer Nathan Slate, his debut at London Fashion Week isn’t about beginnings - it’s about endings, and what we stand to lose if we keep looking away. Under the spotlight of Fashion Scout’s Ones to Watch, Slate unveiled “MOuRNING: A NEW DAWN, WHERE HUMANITY’S LAST HYMN IS FLIES BUZZING” - a collection forged from the very textiles of his recent installation imagining a world where concrete has suffocated nature.

It’s a requiem for the rural, an ode to survival, and a reminder that sustainability isn’t a marketing phrase but an urgent responsibility. And yet, in the starkness, there is still hope: that the quiet voices of the countryside, often drowned out by metropolitan noise, might redefine the future of fashion.

A STORY WOVEN FROM LOSS

Slate’s haunting title signals his intent: “This work is telling the story of a world where we ignored nature and kept paving over it with concrete,” he explains. Across the collection, silhouettes narrate the collapse: two vaguely human figures open the show, evoking farmers; then a storm-cloud interrupts, the human form fractures, flies swarm, and concrete emerges in the cloth itself.

The materials tell their own story too. The textiles - once vast banners dyed with natural pigments and hung outdoors, bearing shadowy impressions of flora and birds - were cut and draped into garments.

“In the installation, they held the memory of life,” Slate says. “In the collection, they’ve become ghosts of what they once were.”

REDEFINING SUSTAINABILITY

At first glance, repurposing installation fabrics into fashion garments feels like a radical act of sustainability. But Slate isn’t interested in easy narratives.

“Sustainability is really important to me,” he reflects. “But it’s also complicated. The cotton industry, for example, consumes enormous amounts of water. Meanwhile, a synthetic brocade can last decades - just like concrete outlives us. So maybe something beautifully designed in synthetics can be more sustainable than something that destroys fields. I’m not prescribing answers—I’m asking questions.”

It’s a stance that challenges fashion’s obsession with clear-cut eco-labels. For Slate, sustainability is not a checkbox but an ongoing conversation.

SOMERSET AS A SOURCE OF STRENGTH

Though Slate has dressed world-renowned performers, he credits Somerset - not celebrity - for grounding his practice. “I tried the cities, but they didn’t give me the comfort the countryside does,” he says. “When I’m at peace, inspired by the imperfections of nature, that’s when my work feels authentic.”

He also points to a growing creative community outside London: “Many of my friends studied or worked in cities, but eventually found their voice here in Somerset. The pace is more forgiving. The work flows without pressure. Rural England is where artists who are content with their voice can live.”

FROM THE FARM FIELDS TO FASHION SCOUT

Being named one of Fashion Scout’s Ones to Watch places Slate in the lineage of talents like Iris Van Herpen and Gareth Pugh—designers who once felt untouchable. “To be on the same stage where they began is unimaginable,” Slate admits. “Gareth Pugh especially was always in my sketchbooks. I still don’t quite believe I’m here.”

But if he feels surreal awe, it doesn’t eclipse his clarity of purpose. His London Fashion Week debut isn’t about spectacle - it’s about reflection. “I hope the audience gets a chance to stop and think,” he says. “About beauty, about appreciating things in the moment. It isn’t a warning or a death note. It’s just a poem I felt I needed to tell.”

As for what comes next, Slate dreams of collaborations that tie back to his roots. “I’d love to design a capsule collection for Clarks,” he says, noting the Somerset-based shoemaker’s history. “Or even a bag for Mulberry - my studio is in the town where their bags are made, and I used to work for them. That would be full circle.”

Through his SL-ATE concept store, he envisions a slower future, one where the boundaries between art and fashion dissolve. “It will always be my space to slow down,” he says. “To mix worlds, focus on craft, and keep asking questions.”

Nathan Slate’s London Fashion Week debut isn’t about the fantasy of fashion. It’s about survival, memory, and reckoning with the landscapes we pave over. In garments cut from the ghosts of an installation, he reminds us that beauty can live in fragility—and that perhaps the most radical act in fashion today is not invention, but remembrance.

Written by Fernanda Ondarza from GLITCH Magazine

Words by Nathan Slate

Nathan Slate presents “MOuRNING: A NEW DAWN, WHERE HUMANITY’S LAST HYMN IS FLIES BUZZING” as part of Fashion Scout’s Ones to Watch 02 at London Fashion Week. Catch the show on Sunday 21 September 2025, from 20:30, at 31 New Inn Yard, Shoreditch, London, EC2A 3EY.