Home Turf

Football, fashion and self-expression with young men from East London

Home Turf was a collaborative project exploring identity, masculinity and self-expression with working-class young men through football and fashion.

Many young men, particularly working-class and Black men, are still rarely given space to open up. They are often negatively portrayed in the media, while their own stories remain unheard or undervalued.

Home Turf took place at London College of Fashion between February and May 2026. Co-created with young men from the local East Bank community and postgraduate students, the project used football and fashion as accessible starting points for deeper conversations about identity, masculinity and self-expression.

The project offers a window into their inner worlds, challenging narrow ideas of masculinity and inviting audiences to see these young men on their own terms.

The exhibition ran from 13 May to 14 June 2026 as part of East Bank's The Music is Black festival. Other project outputs included edited conversations with the co-creators and a publication.

Home Turf was produced by the Portal Centre for Social Impact in collaboration with LCF Kit Room & Studios and Print Studio & Darkrooms.

Conversations

About the project

Home Turf is the creative vision of Ashton Jones-Frame, a cultural producer whose practice is rooted in his working-class, multicultural East London upbringing and lifelong relationship with football and fashion.

In November 2025, Ashton joined London College of Fashion through the Creative Newham Cultural Producers Programme, where he connected with the Portal Centre for Social Impact. This relationship became the foundation of Home Turf.

Earlier in the placement, Ashton and his cohort spent time at Eastside Community Heritage, a Newham-based community archive that preserves the stories of ordinary people. The archive had identified a lack of young Black men’s voices in its collection. Ashton reflected on why those voices might be missing, and how trust, vulnerability and representation shape who feels able to share their story.

Creative approach

As a fashion stylist and football fan, Ashton saw football and fashion as a way in. Drawing on his practice of subverting sportswear campaign imagery, he proposed a collaborative storytelling project exploring race, class, masculinity and vulnerability.

Central to the project are one-to-one conversations between Ashton and the young men who became his co-creators. These care-led conversations move through football, culture and identity, opening up moments of intimate reflection and revelation.

Interdisciplinary postgraduate students helped bring these narratives to life through fashion photography shot in LCF studios and on the pitches of Hackney Marshes, the home of grassroots football in East London.