LONDON — British Guyanese designer Saul Nash is aiming for a bigger stage as he will make his Milan debut this season with Slnsh, a multiseason collaboration developed in partnership with Lululemon.
With an official launch date set for March 11, select looks from Slnsh will be previewed on the runway together with Nash’s fall 2025 collection at a show slated for 4 p.m. CET on Sunday.
With Lululemon’s technical support, Nash, who is also a professional dancer and choreographer, said he was able to find a space that enables him to further explore his relationship with movement.
“The sense of liberation has always been crucial for me. Within the Lululemon collection, that can be done in a practical sense. It is a marriage between my design aesthetics and their innovation, and that creates quite a beautiful harmony,” Nash said.
While the collection is being released on a men’s calendar, it’s aimed at a broader audience.
“I’ve looked at gender as a spectrum. It’s all-encompassing, and I want people to feel like they can identify themselves within that spectrum. I think the Slnsh world is all welcoming for that,” the designer added.
Jonathan Cheung, global creative director at Lululemon, said the partnership with Nash just felt right, as both were born out of a love of movement.
“Nash has an innate understanding of our DNA, taking our technical fabrics and construction methods into his world to produce a collection that stands at the crossroads of performance and style. He is clearly a prodigious talent and it’s been inspiring to work together,” added Cheung, who has more than 30 years of experience in creative and business leadership and who joined Lulelemon in January 2024.
Logo of the Slnsh line under Lululemon.
Courtesy of Lululemon
Known for incorporating movement into the collections and referencing his Caribbean roots and sportswear for the design, Nash is considered a rising star in the London fashion community.
A Central Saint Martins and Royal College of Art alum, Nash made his runway debut during London Fashion Week in 2020 with Lulu Kennedy’s emerging talent support scheme and showed there for three seasons. He then continued to show at LFW under BFC’s Newgen support. In 2022, he was named the International Woolmark Prize winner and received the Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design.
Having taken a break from the runway for a year, with his last runway collection presented during London Fashion Week in February 2024, Nash said his own fall 2025 collection will blend London’s influence with Milan’s elegance.
“It’s been quite an amazing journey just to think about realignment and where I want to go. This year, my brand turned six years old. When I started, I had quite a different relationship with movement. It’s been a rebalancing exercise of what I like and what I want other people to wear. What’s beautiful about this collection is that we looked at what movement meant beyond sports,” Nash said.
For that, he continues to push textile innovation.
“I love the way things are cut and how they sit on the body. At the same time, I’m quite a geek when it comes to going into the materials and trying to understand the compositions and understand if there’s any innovations in garments and technology,” Nash said.
Fall 2025 will also see the brand expanding its range of offerings to include leather and denim for a wardrobe that accommodates the designer’s take on smart dressing.
“If you’d asked me five years ago about how I saw smart dressing, I would probably wear a tracksuit to the Fashion Awards. What’s beautiful now is I’ve been searching for what my version of smart looks like. I hope this show will bring with me the energy of what I represent in London, but see it through a new lens, through an elevated lens in Milan,” he added.
While Nash is heavily associated with putting out mesmerizing dance performances during the show, he thinks movement doesn’t always have to encompass dance.
“What I would like from the next show is that people look at the design and how much thought has gone into the design. Whilst I have a background in dance, design is at the core of what I do. For this show, I want people to look at the design, and take that away with them,” Nash said.
Saul Nash’s sketches of his collaboration with Lululemon, under the name Slnsh.
Courtesy of Lululemon
The designer hopes that moving the show date to synergize with the men’s buying cycle will help the business. Previously, due to the removal of London Fashion Week men’s in January, Nash often had to show the collection to buyers in Paris weeks before he staged a show.
“Every designer is always thinking about what is best for growing their business and how to move on to the next steps. Now the buyers will experience it how I intend it to be seen directly before they come into the showroom. Particularly with my background in performance and storytelling, quite often, it’s not just about the clothing, it’s about the context in which you put them,” he said.
“Also, I think there’s nothing more visceral about physically seeing the clothing walking past you. You don’t even need to touch it, but you can feel how it looks,” Nash added.
