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.
