When Aston Martin Magazine asked me to look at homegrown talent for its ‘Best of British’ issue, I was drawn to people working across very different disciplines who share a certain way of thinking. Together with the editor, I chose a dancer and choreographer, an architect, a fashion designer, a biodesigner and a chef and restaurateur. Each is deeply rooted in a place, whether Dagenham, Stratford, Anglesey or a lab growing colour from food waste, and each kept returning to the same idea: that the more specific the work, the further it can reach.
“The more specific it is, the more rooted in that particular experience, the more universal it lands,” says Botis Seva. I am speaking over video with the Olivier Award-winning choreographer and dancer, founder of Far From the Norm, at his home in London. It’s the Easter holidays and I can hear the patter of children playing in the other room. Warm and affable, he shuts the door to soften the noise, admitting that his approach to life and work has shifted greatly since becoming a father.
Growing up with four siblings and a single mother who had migrated from Angola and Congo, the family struggled financially, moving around before settling in Dagenham in East London. “I’m self-taught, a bedroom dancer,” he smiles. “You buy DVDs, watch videos, practise. I just loved moving. Then when I got introduced to hip hop culture, to dancehall, to contemporary dance, I started experimenting. It really was love of movement first.”
The shift from dancer to maker happened in 2011 at Breakin’ Convention at Sadler’s Wells, where Seva saw the possibilities of directing his movements into something more. “I realised there is a craft to it, much like an architect building a house.” Film, a longstanding passion, became the primary reference point, speaking to the idea of the stage as a room in which you make cinema.
Seva’s talent was spotted, and an invitation to curate Wild Card at the Lilian Baylis Studio followed, which led to a commission by Sadler’s Wells in 2018 to mark the 20th anniversary of its theatre. BLKDOG caught the attention of critics for its genre-defying blend of hip-hop dance and raw commentary on surviving adulthood as a childlike artist, winning the Olivier for Best New Dance Production. The New York Times wrote at the time: “A piece of BLKDOG is enough to establish its choreographer, Botis Seva, as a major new talent.”
His practice was shaped, he says, by the specific texture of East London: football culture, pub culture, the particular experience of being a Black boy navigating spaces that were not always willing to receive him. His current production Until We Sleep will open in Luxembourg in the autumn and travel to London, with Seva now working on a solo show addressing his relationship with the father he never grew up with. “BLKDOG is so dark because I was hiding inside it. Ten years on, and being a father, I can’t hide anymore.”
That same ambition, to make work that is both rooted and open and in service of community, runs through the Why We Make galleries at the newly opened V&A East in Stratford, in a building designed by O’Donnell + Tuomey. It’s the work of Jayden Ali, noted as one of the most exciting voices in architecture today. His London studio JA Projects operates on the principle of genuine collaboration: with communities, with artists, with the people who will inhabit the spaces he makes – something that effectively won him the V&A commission.
One of Ali’s early projects was the redesign of Cherry Trees, a school for boys with behaviour complexities in Bow, where he had worked as a youth play worker. His winning scheme, The Barn, proposes a building open to its surroundings, with connecting spaces and fewer corridors, significantly reducing major incident reports. Then in 2023 Ali came to wider attention as one of four co-curators of the British Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, receiving a Special Mention for National Participation.
Why We Make draws on over 500 objects from the V&A’s collection spanning art, architecture, design, performance and fashion. Rather than working top-down, Ali sat alongside the museum’s youth collectives from the outset, asking how the space should feel, and it was from those conversations that the defining idea emerged: a design language that spoke of the visual energy of East London high streets, the way fabric shops and market stalls stack and display, neon light and salvaged timber sourced from the city’s own trees.
“By drawing inspiration from the high streets and parks that surround the museum, I’d hope young people recognise themselves and their lived existence in the spaces, and the power they already have in making space,” says Ali. On London’s role in his thinking, he is characteristically precise: “It’s less about being rooted in London and more about our projects being ‘rooted’ in context. But London has taught us the power of having an agenda, community and independent output.”
That same rootedness in place and context runs through the work of Steve O Smith, though his medium is cloth rather than concrete. Smith’s practice is an ode to the original bespoke fashion model, a model that changed in the 1950s when clothing became mass produced. “I think of the garments as drawings, and that is reflected in the way they exist: made-to-order, one of a kind, each slightly different from the other,” he says. His process starts with a drawing on paper, which he will then translate using appliqué, embroidery and different freehand techniques onto garments. The process, he says, is similar to putting marks on a page. “It’s a matter of collapsing that concept and thinking of the clothes as drawings, and then as a business idea, too.”
His practice speaks to an audience exhausted by the sameness and disposability of so-called luxury fashion, winning Smith the 2025 Karl Lagerfeld Prize. Eddie Redmayne and his wife have worn his designs to the Met Gala, and Emma Stone appeared in his piece in the Yorgos Lanthimos-directed Squarespace campaign that aired during the Super Bowl.
When drawing, Smith works from a tight edit of three to five reference images distilled from a much larger research pool. He has spent years in conversation with the German Expressionists, and is currently turning towards the Fauves, drawn, he says, by their relationship to colour. A particular touchstone is Pavel Tchelitchew – the surrealist painter whose fluid, almost liquid figuration shaped the physical instinct behind Smith’s mark-making. He says, “It becomes less about intellectual reference and more about the physical act of how I’m going to draw.”
Smith sees London as critical to his way of thinking, with colleges such as Central Saint Martins, where he did his master’s, encouraging their fashion students to do something different to what everyone else is doing. “That environment, combined with a free-thinking attitude that I think is particular to London creatively, made the whole concept of treating garments as drawings feel possible,” he says, before adding, “and so did disrupting the business structure around it.” It’s a model that, by cutting out wholesale entirely, allows him to retain the full margin on every piece he makes.
Also questioning the norms of fashion is Natsai Audrey Chieza, who sees material as the message. The founder of London-based design agency Faber Futures, launched in 2018, Chieza bridges advancements in biotechnology with real-world applications, pioneering the use of microbial fermentation to produce sustainable textile dyes and exploring how biological systems can potentially transform colour production and reduce the environmental impact of industries such as fashion. Trained in architecture and with a master’s in material futures, she is less interested in biology fixing industry than in industry being biologised, and clients and commissioning bodies including the V&A, the Design Museum, adidas, MIT Media Lab and the World Economic Forum have taken note.
The bacterial dyeing process, fed on food waste rather than petrochemical inputs, produces colour whose aesthetic outcome shifts depending on what the microbe is given to consume. “That notion of provenance becomes a really important story, and helps us begin to understand a new way of thinking about what luxury might mean,” she says, adding that it is a question of systemic change. “A fast fashion house can adopt that technology, but the fast fashion logic doesn’t change.” In 2023, Chieza co-founded Normal Phenomena of Life as a consumer brand to demonstrate the practicalities of biotechnology in creating beautifully designed new materials.
As chef and owner of two of London’s celebrated restaurants, Brat and Mountain, Tomos Parry is asking similar questions but of food. Inspired by the rigour and heritage of French, Nordic and Californian cooking, he has long wondered what an equivalent Welsh cuisine might look like. “I’ve taken huge inspiration from all of those cuisines, and I admire how closely they stay connected to their heritage,” he says. “Growing up, I often wondered what a Celtic or specifically Welsh cuisine might look like, and whether I could express that through my own work. When I opened the restaurant, that became the aim. I thought that if I applied the same work ethic, commitment, and no-compromise approach as those leading cuisines, I might be able to cook with real conviction and that would resonate with people.”
Brat, which opened in Shoreditch in 2018, drew immediate international attention, the menu changing twice daily in response to what would arrive fresh that morning. Parry’s philosophy is quite simple: produce, fire, plate. “The way an ingredient interacts with fire is fundamental to how successful the dish will be,” he says, and the dish begins long before the kitchen, in the sourcing, supplier relationships, and what nature makes available. “If Welsh lobsters are in season and in abundance, then dishes must be written around them. You can’t create in a vacuum.”
London, Parry says, has been equally shaping. “There is a growing confidence in trusting our own produce and influences, rather than looking outward for validation,” he says. “London has always been very diverse, but now there is a stronger sense of identity in how chefs interpret that diversity. There is less pressure to fit into a predefined mould, and more willingness to let ingredients and instinct guide the cooking.”
This article was first published in Aston Martin Magazine V63, summer 2026.
Botis Seva photography ©Camilla Greenwell & Far From the Norm