Wales Bonner (Q3664)
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Wales Bonner is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Wales Bonner |
Wales Bonner is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
This hardcore tropical Wales Bonner collection was colored by the archive of Althea McNish, who emigrated from Trinidad to the UK aged 27 in 1950. McNish’s talent for graphic design and longing for home combined to fuel the saturated intensity of her textiles, which proved highly successful commissions for English interiors stalwarts such as Heal’s and Liberty. During her research, Wales Bonner was, thanks to McNish’s estate, even able to to inspect the late designer’s own wardrobe—which led to the development of a gorgeous belted skirt based on a McNish-worn dress.Wales Bonner’s retracing and retelling of McNish’s creative journey saw her embellish the original prints in embroideries on camp collar shirts and hip-slung skirts, or use embroidery on otherwise white garments as a sort of inverted footprint. It also provided the entry point into a suggestive yet subtle Wales Bonner voyage based around maritime cities. The new-profile black-sequined Adidas sneakers, the black leather rivet-patched shorts, and the cropped black heavy nylon workwear all gleamed in movement like the shine of harborside lighting reflected in the sea beyond. Marine striped knitwear and formal evening wear suiting and outerwear tailored with house partners Anderson & Sheppard or Crombie were all minutely subverted through tweaks in reduced proportion or unorthodox materiality to create an opaquely palpable otherness.The designer said this collection featured proportionally more womenswear than in the past, adding, “it’s a growing part of our business.” The absolute exactitude in her delivery of a perforated stretch knit tank dress, or a net-sheathed monochrome print dress—more chiaroscuro—provided evidence as to why. Adidas-wise, the high-top but low profile suede upper applied to the classic scallop-toe Superstar was another example of Wales Bonner’s talent for apparently minute yet transformative design interventions.
19 June 2024
The phenomenon that’s Grace Wales Bonner relies on the fact that she’s so deeply studied, so taken seriously as a leading young cultural connector, artist, and intellectual across multiple genres and generations. And yet, as a fashion designer, the magic of all her complex thinking and integrity gets distilled and centered in clothes that never come out as studied at all.So it is with her fall ’24 show—a catnip combination of varsity Americana and her easy expertise in excellent Savile Row British tailoring. “It’s called Dream Study,” she explained beforehand. “It’s very inspired by Howard University, and me spending more time in America. I’ve been working on a research project with the university in Washington, DC. It has an amazing literary heritage, with writers like Zora Neale Hurston, and all the amazing voices that have been there.”What really caught her interest in the storied Black university’s archives, though, were the yearbooks. “Particularly the ones from the 1990s,” she explained. “Every year they have a homecoming, with performances of different hip-hop artists coming to celebrate. So it was kind of both exploring the history of the place, but also this kind of musical intersection that’s always been something important to me. So I was thinking about conscious and cosmic hip-hop. How it kind of takes on the mantle of intellectual thinking, and kind of takes it further.”(For the record: The reason Wales Bonner’s been spending time in the States is that she curated an exhibition “Spirit Movers,” as part of MoMA’s Artists Choice series in New York last year. Typical of her curiosity—and ability to open doors—that she’d delve into a second academic journey while she was at it.)As the show got underway—her meticulously made peacoats, gray flannel ‘academic’ suits, student sweatshirts, WB-logo leather varsity jackets and shearling jackets—the soundscape took us somewhere else. Just as we’d got to read Wales Bonner’s closely-typed pamphlet of background information that it was an “original work by Rashad Ringo Smith and Yasiin Bey… inspired by the evolution of cosmic and conscious expression,” up jumped Bey himself, and began a performance as the models filed by (Tyler Mitchell and Imaan Hammam among them.)Everyone wants to come along with the cultural change in fashion that Wales Bonner has been catalyzing—first, as a generational leader of many Black and brown creative talents in Britain, and steadily ever more internationally.
It’s fascinating to watch how she does this—teaching, foregrounding academic literary references (with every show, there’s a reading list), and building long-term collaborations with entities as far apart in fashion as Adidas and Anderson and Sheppard of Savile Row.If you wanted to look at her work on the broader plane, you could also say her clothes belong to the “plain and pragmatic” trend that seems to be running through fashion at the moment. But that would be to miss the detail that sets Wales Bonner’s pieces apart: the minute silver embroidery edging a light tweed, raw-edged skirt, the mirror techniques, the decorative studs on desert boots, or the just-so refinement of a raw silk shirt. As high-flying and cerebral as she is, the joy of making clothes for Wales Bonner manifests in making them real. “Different cultural references combining, in something quite essential,” is the way she puts it. “I think I want to do something that’s not superfluous.”
17 January 2024
Last year in Valencia, Yomif Kejelcha Atomsa completed a half marathon in 58 minutes and 32 seconds: his personal best. This evening in Paris, it took the Ethiopian athlete over an hour from the starting time of 6:30 pm to complete one approximately 250 meter circuit around La Monnaie de Paris’s courtyard. Equally off the pace was his fellow Ethiopian long distance runner Tamirat Tola. Neither, however, was injured; they were receiving a crash course in how to run fashionably late.Grace Wales Bonner recruited both men to walk in a show that was crowded with guests including the famously fast Lewis Hamilton and the legendarily tardy Naomi Campbell. They were there as part of a mise-en-scene that Wales Bonner had constructed with signature completeness. The collection it encapsulated, entitled Marathon, was (said her notes) “an ode to long journeys and life missions. A celebration of soulful pursuits and inspired movement.”Once off the starting blocks, the collection quickly found a steady rhythm alternating between Wales Bonner’s mainline and the looks produced as part of her ongoing brand partnership with adidas Originals. The tailoring, made with Anderson & Sheppard, combined the usual impeccably dignified proportions with hand applied embellishments and elevated fabrication details. A denim suit with printed side stripes for men and a white jacket piped in silver beading for women with Wales Bonner’s preferred high collar were standouts here. An irregular hemmed cheetah spot vest in cowhide provided a jolt of contrast. Some white-piped pajama style shorts and a shirt printed with marigolds were a diverting detour.Switching to sport there were of course sneakers, including a replica of the adidas Neftegna in which Haile Gebrselassie won the Berlin Marathon in 2008. Tamirat Tola won the pick of the tracksuits: fine knit and green and gold. There was an interesting interplay between sporting shapes and English country pattern that included a running poncho in tattersall and a ’70s running short in check. The post-finale turn by the athletes’ compatriot Haddis Alemayehu on the lute-like masinko was enchanting, but there were two more shows tonight. We had to run.
21 June 2023
“Somehow, I feel like being away from home, in somewhere like Paris has this romance and grandeur about it.” You could say that again about the entry of Graces Wales Bonner into the City of Light. Her show took place in an historic suite of salons—all chandeliers, boiserie, and ancient wallpapers—at the Hotel D’Evreux. This hallowed site is at the very corner of the Place Vendome, the heart of haute French luxury. It couldn’t have been a more intentional choice of backdrop for the aspirations of this most studied of young designers, who often repeats “bringing an Afro-Atlantic spirit to an idea of European luxury” as her mantra.Her abiding mission to elevate “Black male style; a very refined approach to masculinity” took on the Parisian sojourns of the American writer and intellectual giant James Baldwin, the fabulously wealthy young Maharaja and Maharani of Indore, and fanned out to admire the showgirl, style-maker and activist Josephine Baker. By immersing herself in their worlds, she said she found herself transported, not so much by the idea of literal references of costume as by the uplifting effect of the cultural atmosphere. “Thinking about what Paris as a place gave them license to do and express. This idea of freedom of self-expression, to define yourself.” Paris, she speculated, “may create space to have more license to be expressive.”The award-winning jazz trumpeter Herman Mehari stood in the middle of the apartment and played as a procession of sophisticated “Black flanuers” threaded its way through the rooms. First out was a strikingly precise black tailored coat with half its upturned collar in white. On its breast was pinned a brooch—one of several composites of baroque pearl and Ghanaian bead jewelry that studded the show with a sense of the ceremonial.Checking back on Wales Bonner’s sources, that riveting entrance was clearly an echo of a famous 1929 high Deco-period portrait of the Maharaja in black tie evening dress, flashing a white-lined cape. In fact, Wales Bonner’s translation was tailored for her on Savile Row by Anderson & Sheppard, as were the superb silk tuxedo suits that wended their way further down the line.Her knack is for drawing her own clever intellectual line between past and present. Saturated as her pieces are with cultural symbolism, she always takes care that the way they’re put together is wearable and relatable.
You could see that knack of hers as you scanned down an outfit—say, a precision cut tailored jacket, worn with cotton utility-type trousers and babouche slippers. Babouches walked the parquet in many variants; twinkling silver and sparkly and with Mary Jane straps on the toes for women.
18 January 2023
Towards the end of the press preview of this sumptuously progressive show, Grace Wales Bonner mentioned Sankofa. This bird-looking-backwards symbol of Ghana’s Akan people, she said: “means’ ‘going back to go forward.’ It is not about being nostalgic or historical. It’s about taking something from the past in order to pass it forward and make it useful for the future. And that’s the spirit of this collection.”Wales Bonner was speaking in the central courtyard of Florence’s Palazzo Medici Riccardi, a space where one Pitti Uomo executive mentioned in passing that there had never before been a live fashion show. It was as if the Palazzo had been waiting 485 years—the time since it was once home to the first Black head of state in modern Europe—to become the outbound runway for this evening’s Sankofa flightpath.Its starting cipher was Alessandro de Medici, who until his assassination in 1537 at the hand of a cousin ruled here as the first hereditary monarch of the Florentine Republic. His mother was named Simonetta da Collevecchio—aka “Soenara”—and was Black. She, history a little shakily relates, was a house servant who became mother to Alessandro after an encounter with either Duke Lorenzo (the official father) or Pope Clement VII.“I wanted to acknowledge that presence but also think about the idea of arrival,” said Wales Bonner. The building also held an additional layer of resonance relevant to her practice of excavating multifaceted manifestations of cultural intersection through garments. The palazzo was commissioned by Alessandro’s ancestor Cosimo in 1444, around the same time that he hosted the 17th ecumenical council, a global gathering of Christendom which according to historian Paul Strathern included: “Armenians and Ethiopians… other entourages included Moorish, Berber, and black African attendants.”All of this context served as evidence that the building around us has played a role in the history of Black agency and participation in Renaissance Italy. It was leveled by the intervention in the Palladian architecture around us by the artist Ibrahim Mahama, who clad the space in a huge patchwork of hand stitched jute sacks originally used to export cocoa from his home country of Ghana—where Wales Bonner met him several months ago—into the global markets. “It was important to have an equal representation within the space,” said Wales Bonner.
14 June 2022
Grace Wales Bonner was planning to have a show in Paris, but British-French Covid travel restrictions put paid to that. For the moment. No matter—Wales Bonner, once a long-distance runner, is all about pacing herself and doing things when the time is right for her. Which made it all the more eye-opening to spend time alone with her in her studio in London, to see her collection close-up, and to hear her talk about the impressive multi-disciplinary sweep of the work she’s been doing since lockdown. Which is a lot.Her fall collection is called ‘Togetherness,’ a name which refers to her research on the great American jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, an initiator of world fusion music, and the life that he and his Swedish painter, textile artist, and musical collaborator wife Moki Karlsson led in Sweden in the 1970s. (Neneh Cherry is his step-daughter; the extended family is a multi-generational music dynasty.) “I was keen to show this slippage between past and present, and what’s an archive image, and what’s a new image,” Wales Bonner said, switching on the dreamy video she shot with director Steven Traylor to launch the collection. A spoken-word soundtrack over music by LA friends captures an idyllically romantic mood: “Love that is sewn together cannot be untethered over time.”The clothes on her rails testified to how cleverly Wales Bonner is qualitatively evolving her mission “to bring an Afro-Atlantic spirit to European luxury.” What looks simple in her lookbook tends to belie the desirable details—such is the problem with digital imagery—but in real life, her pieces are tactile, classily-crafted things that cry out to be worn. On a duffel coat there are toggles tipped with lapis lazuli. On a checked coat: tan buttons with Wales Bonner imprinted, tinily in the center. Narrow bands of her signature crochet stitching is sewn into her knits. On a tailored jacket: contrasting striped seersucker sleeves are woven in organic cotton by craftspeople in Burkina Faso.“Focusing on how to elevate the everyday,” is how she puts it. That feeling—that you want it immediately when you see it—goes right down to her footwear: collaged-brocade Mary Janes and multi-colored Gazelles patchworked with edgings of crochet and blanket-stitch. They’re part of the Wales Bonner x adidas collaboration, which leapt off the starting blocks, steadily building a following, three years ago.
The fact that there’s also a man’s tailored two-button jacket made of the same floral brocade underlines the ambition of her strategy: to build a brand—just like the major luxury houses—which simultaneously serves uber-expensive and quotidian fashion. With meanings that enlighten.
23 January 2022
Grace Wales Bonner’s collections have long presented tours of Black cultural perspectives, centering esteemed figures like Haile Selassie and Ishmael Reed, exploring diasporic histories, and imagining worlds beyond their limits. Over the past three seasons, the designer—who is known for her rigorous approach to research—doubled down even further, presenting a trilogy dedicated to the cultural and sartorial threads woven between Britain and the Caribbean. “There was a lot of responsibility in those last collections,” she reflected. “But now I feel confident. I’ve been working on this [brand] for nearly six years, and its history, its foundation, has been set. Now I don’t necessarily need to work in the same way. I can be more playful, more light.”That sentiment was directly visible in a collection that felt like one of her most liberated yet: clothing that riffed off the ideas of self-representation proposed in the 1970s by photographers like the Malian Malick Sidibé and the Burkinabé Sanlé Sory but seemed instinctively rather than historically conceived. “That period of time felt like a turning point in terms of people taking control of the camera—no longer being observed or object but taking ownership of their image,” explained Wales Bonner. “Malick Sidibé’s are the images that started me off wanting to design clothing.” Completing the circle both felt, and appeared, a natural fit.So patterns from the backdrops that turned up in their portraiture were loosely adapted into the geometric jacquards of a track two-piece or the gradient stripes on cotton skirts. The most literal renditions—the Japanese-inspired floral print of a shirt taken from one of Sory’s subjects and a collaborative reprisal of a T-shirt from the photographer’s archival studio uniforms—slipped neatly into a relaxed array of the ’70s silhouettes that are part of the Wales Bonner vocabulary.The vibrant nightlife surrounding the collection’s namesake, Volta Jazz—musicians who were regular subjects in Sory’s studio—provided reference points for the spirit of cool eclecticism that pervaded, their staple denim now evolved into crisp-cut dark washes. “In Sory’s photographs, you can see the Afro-Atlantic connections—people wearing Bob Marley T-shirts or ones that come from France. It feels like a dynamic, connected place, and you can feel the influence of different styles of dress, of rock and roll,” Wales Bonner noted.
“I think it connects to how we’re living right now—and the kind of ease with which we want to dress.”The refined insouciance of Sidibé and Sory’s subjects presents a natural parallel with Wales Bonner’s distinct aesthetic; even her most relaxed pieces—the cotton dashikis or her collaboration with Adidas (which continues this season, surely to the delight of many)—always maintain an exacting finesse. As ever, the devil is in the details: a utilitarian denim jacket stitched with handwoven cotton accents made in Burkina Faso; textiles from the country inset into a cowboy-inflected Harrington. “And the denim itself is made in Morocco,” the designer said. “I’m trying to think about how to celebrate craft and making from different places in the world as well.” Where Wales Bonner excels is in quietly crafting those connections, in exploring the cross-pollination—both material and cultural—between different points in time and place. And, as her meticulous focus finds its groove, the result appears entirely harmonious.
22 June 2021
At the start of last year, when Covid took hold of the world, fashion was finally forced to address the ever-accelerating speed of its output. The industry’s frenetic pace has long been a subject of cocktail party conversations, but it seems it took a pandemic to instill even a modicum of change. Grace Wales Bonner has never been one to acquiesce to the constraints of the traditional fashion calendar—she has alternated between showing menswear and womenswear, and oscillated between runway shows and lookbooks depending on what best suits. But, with times what they are, even she paced her process—and so her latest collection showcased the final chapter in a trilogy, begun last January, which explores the cultural and sartorial threads that interlink Britain and the Caribbean. “This subject is the starting point for why I’m interested in creating,” said the designer, who is British born but of Jamaican heritage. “During this time I feel like I’ve really been grounding myself in this framework, and refining myself within it. These collections are about consolidating and reinforcing what is timeless to me; representing the breadth of what Wales Bonner is, and can be.”Thus far in the series the designer has looked to the second-generation Jamaicans who established London’s 1970s Lovers Rock scene to inform her designs, and then the dress of Jamaica’s dancehall and reggae stars. Here she started by exploring the wardrobes of Britain’s Black scholars in the 1980s: those who traveled from across the world to study at the likes of Oxford and Cambridge. There was a reimagining of their academic attire—of tweed blazers and knitted scarves, well-worn chinos and striped jumpers—but within that historicism, “I was thinking about how in certain spaces people create a language for themselves,” reflected Wales Bonner. “About how you might disrupt an institution from inside.”It’s a subject that has long fascinated the designer, whose brand was established with the intention of disrupting the luxury perspective, redirecting it from its often singular focus on Eurocentricity. So poets like the Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite and the Saint Lucian Derek Walcott appeared as more than just aesthetic character studies; rather, they were catalysts for considering a post-colonial movement that explored “what it is to be in another place, or from another place.
” The resonant words of Braithwaite, who left Bridgetown to study at the University of Cambridge, were spoken over the immersive film directed by Jeano Edwards which accompanied the collection: “You had not come to England / You were home.”
23 January 2021
What Grace Wales Bonner has been proposing throughout her career is a concept that has now, finally, come toward the forefront of fashion: exploring Black culture and aesthetics with the same nuance and consideration that has long been afforded Eurocentrism. This season, alongside a look book photographed by Sean and Seng, the designer remotely worked on a film with director Jeano Edwards to present an immersive, intimate snapshot of Jamaica, and has created a digitally available zine to further expand on her research process. There is a piece in it written by Mahfuz Sultan, where he describes the importance of “Grace’s poetic interstices, the worlds between worlds, where Africa, India, and the islands touch as if on a dance floor…at least for those of us who, like Malik Ambar or Aimé Césaire, have spent our lives on the postcolonial circuit, flickering in and out of other stories as shades, exiles, ephemera.”It is that illumination that has forged a pathway for London’s array of emergent non-white designers: a flourishing generation following in her footsteps and narrating their own histories and identities. “There’s always been a continuity to the way I’ve worked, because I’ve expressed who I am and my position quite clearly since I started,” Wales Bonner says (she once explained to me that, “The brand was conceptualized as a means to elevate the location of Blackness within the fashion landscape”). Now, she continues: “When people expect me to have some point of view on what’s been happening…well, I feel I’ve tried to show that over the past five years. There are certain things we’ve always known. It’s more that now, other people are catching up.”This season that sense of continuity, and of Wales Bonner applying her microscope to regularly marginalized narratives, was more explicitly visible than ever. Instead of taking a new era as her starting point, she zoomed in further on her deeply personal fall 2020 offering: an exploration of Lovers Rock and the second-generation Jamaican community of 1970s London. While last season was situated in Lewisham, and within the wardrobes of her father and his friends in late-1970s London, this time she located her perspective in early-’80s Jamaica. “It’s been a really wonderful exercise to be able to go into more depth and reflect on research over a more extended period,” she notes.
28 September 2020
That there were four British women of color showing menswear collections today in London is a milestone which should be marked. Much of the credit for that is due to Grace Wales Bonner and her success in exploring her background through the medium of clothes. The intellectual contexts and the focused, unhurried excellence she brings to her shows have surely encouraged the younger designers Bianca Saunders and Priya Ahluwalia, who also had presentations today. Meanwhile, the credibility of the pioneering Martine Rose, for whom people now schlep miles to see, confirms the idea that the multidirectional female black British gaze on masculinity would make a great subject for a PhD.Wales Bonner was in a relaxed mood as she presided over the London-Caribbean social event which devolved over a Jamaican buffet and a bar stocked with Red Stripe after her show. She had friends and audience members sitting at tables around a dance floor, joining her celebration of Lovers Rock, the specifically British Afro-Caribbean music scene sprung from underground London house parties in the ’70s. As she wrote in a welcoming line, it was “dedicated to everyone inna di area.”“Lovers Rock was created by second generation Jamaicans in this country, their own kind of sweet mix of reggae and soul,” she said. “It’s a reflection of my family on my father’s side. My grandad came from Jamaica in the 1950s. My dad used to work on Lewisham Road, and I found these documentary photographs by John Goto of teenagers at Lewisham Youth Club in the ’70s.”What fascinated and touched Wales Bonner was how kids of her dad’s generation wore clothes which referenced Jamaican style and Rasta flag colors, woven into a “a fun mix-up” of standard English smartness, “irreverent, but always elegant.”There was a denim tailored coat with brass buttons, lined with velvet; a girl in a corduroy patchwork matching shirt and skirt color-blocked in red, yellow, green, and black; slim-fit ’70s track pants; and “the kind of Adidas trainers Bob Marley would have worn.”The full repertoire of Wales Bonner’s judiciously considered tailoring was on display—tweedy suits, separates, and coats, worn over body-hugging poorboy sweaters and roll-necks, with a stronger representation of womenswear in prim-preppy combinations of blazers and full pleated skirts.“I’ve been all around the world, and now this is like a homecoming,” she laughed.
Instead of immersing herself in academia in American universities and journeys tracing lines of spiritual histories in Africa, all she had to do this time was ask around older friends and relations in London. “I felt a lot of familiarity in this,” she says. “It’s really a reflection of my family. I wanted people to be able to see themselves in it.”Close-to-home, community-centric collections are emerging as a strong thread in the first shows of 2020. The self-knowledge Wales Bonner has gained means she knows who she is and what her brand stands for by now. “It’s coming up for five years,” she says, boggled. “I’m looking back and consolidating. For me, my approach is elegant, designed, and crafty—about what’s the perfect suit? Now I want to build the business.”Does she realize that at the age of 29 she’s become a cultural leader for designers who now feel inspired to look into their own community histories? “Well, most of the time you’re in your own bubble, working,” she admits. “But it feels good, like tonight, to be able to connect the generations.”
5 January 2020
It’s an understatement to say that Grace Wales Bonner has had an explosive year. In late April, she received a call asking her to make the white sleeveless coat-dress that the Duchess of Sussex would wear to present newborn Archie to the world with Prince Harry on May 8. That royal endorsement came fast on the heels of her winning the BFC/VogueFashion Fund prize on May 1, and just weeks after she’d shown her stellar Fall collection amid the exhibition she curated for the Serpentine Galleries. Next, it was off to New York to collaborate with Solange Knowles on a music and fashion “devotional” happening as part of Frieze. In addition to all that, her collaboration with Maria Grazia Chiuri for the Dior Marrakech show—the Bar jacket tailoring she worked on with the house—happened too. And that’s not all: On October 19, she’s due back in New York to speak at theVogueForces of Fashion conference.Anyone else would be well out of breath after all that, but no! A preternaturally calm personality (related, perhaps, to a summer spent at a yoga retreat in Mongolia), Wales Bonner has also found time to produce a Spring collection. “It’s called Mambo, the third in a series exploring spirituality,” she explains, making a sound as if designing and making it was some kind of test. “In the last six months I needed time for introspection, to have more visibility on all aspects of my business and to clarify my vision. Having a lot of opportunities—which I’ve been lucky to have—can be distracting from building foundations, and so I’ve really appreciated having the headspace of being serious and practical.”What she means is that there’s a look book rather than a show this time, but one which does equal justice to the fact that she is steadily defining and refining her cut and the composition of her clothes. As ever, she’d been set off by reading an academic work, this time by Robert Farris Thompson, a Yale professor who is an authority on Cuban mambo culture. “So I was looking at Cuban culture in the ’40s and ’50s, borrowing from a black ballet dancer’s wardrobe, and military details, and elements of evening wear.”
13 September 2019
Grace Wales Bonner is a kind of spiritual leader for many in London fashion. Her sensitive, dignified, academically researched and annotated collections about black male identity are, in fact, technically quite reserved, but her very presence on the scene has encouraged the rise of a whole wave of younger black British designers and creative people behind her. Now the 28-year-old’s influence has spread yet further: into the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, where she has curated an exhibition, “A Time for New Dreams,” and up through generations of literary elders whose work she has been studying.It was a ceremonial rite of some magnitude when the great American writer, cultural theorist, and musician Ishmael Reed played a jazz composition on the piano and writer Ben Okri recited a poem he had written for her, as her Fall fashion show walked by in the gallery. Wales Bonner said she reveres these literary changemakers “as oracles or shamans, whose writing connects back to spiritual origins of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. They’ve connected me to ideas that allow me to be who I am.”As part of her exhibition, she has a domestic shrine to all the people whose ideas have formed her thinking—there is a TV monitor on it running footage of Reed and Okri talking on shows in the ’70s and ’80s. She had an epiphany when she read Reed’s passage “where he asks himself, ‘Am I religious?’ I see it as acquiring knowledge. So he’s connecting wisdom and learning with spirituality. That’s something I’ve been thinking about in this exhibition—studying as a form of transcendence,” she said.Pretty mind-blowing, then, that she’s been able to commission both Reed and Okri to make new work for her show. “It’s been really profound. Ben Okri and Ishmael Reed fully shaped my ideas about African spirituality, mysticism, and magic. It’s like a call and response. The new things that can come out of that dialogue have been so interesting,” she explained.Ishmael Reed’s name was emblazoned on her opening look: an emblematic hybrid of an American football shirt and an African tunic. The cerebral, imaginative reading she’s been doing made her want to concentrate the collection on African intellectualism. “I was inspired by black intellectual dress at Howard University, the first black university, and I started looking through a lot of yearbooks and identifying a lot of items, like a mac or a varsity jacket, and a specific type of wider tailoring,” she said.
“So it’s actually quite American, but then I’m trying to imbue this classic framework, but with this sense of magic that comes from another place. Voodoo jewelry feathers.”
17 February 2019
It’s almost beginning to feel as if the history of ’60s and early ’70s counterculture is replaying itself before our eyes. Since the election of Trump in 2016, the radical impulses of angry “wokeness” have started to metabolize, among some, into a search for inner peace and spiritual enlightenment. The evidence is all there with young fashion designers, the fast-response creative vocalizers of zeitgeist-y collective think. In the past week, Craig Green, Cottweiler, and Charles Jeffrey all spoke, variously, about the search for states of transcendence, and now comes the conversation with Grace Wales Bonner. She has called her collection Ecstatic Recital, and has gone yet deeper, right back to sources that any hippie who lived through the events of ’67–’71 might find incredibly familiar.“It’s about entering this kind of eastern mysticism through sound,” she said, quietly placing a book, published in 1971,Be Here Now, on the desk in front of her. “It’s by Ram Dass, one of the first people who brought ideas of yoga and meditation to a Western audience. It’s one of the first books which introduced the idea of finding a spiritual path.” Ram Dass had an early association with Timothy Leary (which he subsequently repudiated). It was the tune in, turn on, drop out era. Now the Hanuman Foundation holds the rights to Ram Dass’s works. “And they very kindly gave me permission to work with some of their archive.” Inspirational texts from the book appear printed on polo shirts and cotton pieces. One reads: “The stillness. The calmness. The fulfillment. When you make love and experience the ecstasy of unity.” Wales Bonner says some of the proceeds will go back to the foundation.Indian-influenced mystical practices might seem a surprising departure for a young woman who has spent her career thus far leading the awareness around black identity, but Wales Bonner found her way into this new phase through the same portal. “I accessed India through African-American artists,” she said, explaining how prayer chimes came to be suspended on the button hole of a cream tailored jacket, and why she’s used patch-worked brocades from India (recycled from scraps) as apron wraps.
She started on this path while listening to the “devotional music” of Alice Coltrane, the African-American jazz musician who went on to set up her own ashram in California in the ’80s, and by studying the late African-American sculptor Terry Adkins, whose body of work involved creating fantastical musical instruments. “He was kind of a shaman, I’d say.” There are prints of Adkins’s images on cotton patches that appear on a blue-and-white-striped shirt. She likes the idea of “someone who wears their history.”Wales Bonner is a practitioner of that which she preaches—she spent time on a retreat in India recently—although she’d certainly disagree with the preachy turn of phrase. “I’m transparent about the meaning of what I do, but it’s not prescriptive,” she considers. In the end, it’s a more relaxed collection, mixing in nylon yoga pants with cargo pockets, and jersey pieces with her more familiar signature tailoring and some of the elaborate embroideries she’s known for. This time, she’s reintroduced the womenswear she omitted from her last show. “I’ve been looking at 1920s eveningwear and portraits of a maharaja—I think it works, when it’s in contrast with technical clothing.”Noticeably, Wales Bonner is a dropout in another sense: She didn’t show in London men’s Fashion Week, and her devotees missed her. It doesn’t take much inner contemplation to sense that she’s planning a way of exposing her textiles and tenets to followers and potential converts in another format. She was tight-lipped about it—though it’s likely to involve poetic quasi-documentary filmmaking. Fashion needs to be communicated on many planes these days.
22 June 2018
It’s almost beginning to feel as if the history of ’60s and early ’70s counterculture is replaying itself before our eyes. Since the election of Trump in 2016, the radical impulses of angry “wokeness” have started to metabolize, among some, into a search for inner peace and spiritual enlightenment. The evidence is all there with young fashion designers, the fast-response creative vocalizers of zeitgeist-y collective think. In the past week, Craig Green, Cottweiler, and Charles Jeffrey all spoke, variously, about the search for states of transcendence, and now comes the conversation with Grace Wales Bonner. She has called her collection Ecstatic Recital, and has gone yet deeper, right back to sources that any hippie who lived through the events of ’67–’71 might find incredibly familiar.“It’s about entering this kind of eastern mysticism through sound,” she said, quietly placing a book, published in 1971,Be Here Now, on the desk in front of her. “It’s by Ram Dass, one of the first people who brought ideas of yoga and meditation to a Western audience. It’s one of the first books which introduced the idea of finding a spiritual path.” Ram Dass had an early association with Timothy Leary (which he subsequently repudiated). It was the tune in, turn on, drop out era. Now the Hanuman Foundation holds the rights to Ram Dass’s works. “And they very kindly gave me permission to work with some of their archive.” Inspirational texts from the book appear printed on polo shirts and cotton pieces. One reads: “The stillness. The calmness. The fulfillment. When you make love and experience the ecstasy of unity.” Wales Bonner says some of the proceeds will go back to the foundation.Indian-influenced mystical practices might seem a surprising departure for a young woman who has spent her career thus far leading the awareness around black identity, but Wales Bonner found her way into this new phase through the same portal. “I accessed India through African-American artists,” she said, explaining how prayer chimes came to be suspended on the button hole of a cream tailored jacket, and why she’s used patch-worked brocades from India (recycled from scraps) as apron wraps.
She started on this path while listening to the “devotional music” of Alice Coltrane, the African-American jazz musician who went on to set up her own ashram in California in the ’80s, and by studying the late African-American sculptor Terry Adkins, whose body of work involved creating fantastical musical instruments. “He was kind of a shaman, I’d say.” There are prints of Adkins’s images on cotton patches that appear on a blue-and-white-striped shirt. She likes the idea of “someone who wears their history.”Wales Bonner is a practitioner of that which she preaches—she spent time on a retreat in India recently—although she’d certainly disagree with the preachy turn of phrase. “I’m transparent about the meaning of what I do, but it’s not prescriptive,” she considers. In the end, it’s a more relaxed collection, mixing in nylon yoga pants with cargo pockets, and jersey pieces with her more familiar signature tailoring and some of the elaborate embroideries she’s known for. This time, she’s reintroduced the womenswear she omitted from her last show. “I’ve been looking at 1920s eveningwear and portraits of a maharaja—I think it works, when it’s in contrast with technical clothing.”Noticeably, Wales Bonner is a dropout in another sense: She didn’t show in London men’s Fashion Week, and her devotees missed her. It doesn’t take much inner contemplation to sense that she’s planning a way of exposing her textiles and tenets to followers and potential converts in another format. She was tight-lipped about it—though it’s likely to involve poetic quasi-documentary filmmaking. Fashion needs to be communicated on many planes these days.
22 June 2018
Something about Grace Wales Bonner: She’s become a slick tailor, in double-quick order. Hard as it is to compute that this LVMH Prize–winner of 2016 is only in her fourth season, this smart young woman has somehow mastered the technical know-how behind making suits. In the beginning, it wasn’t so. How could it be, when she was just a BA Fashion graduate? There were lumpy velvets, retro-sporty zippered knits, slightly crude crystal embroideries, and other ideas signaled as ambitions—all charming, inexperienced sign postings of where she might want to head, technically. Now, there’s a sense that she is there, settled, at a place where her laser-focus on getting things right has perfected the cut of a jacket and the fit and drape of a pair of trousers. It’s expensive-looking, faultless. She’s on a professional par with designers much older and wealthier, and in places such as Italy and France. She’s become the mistress of the white suit.This season, it was about another aspect of black male history and identity, subject matter she’s been researching, in her allusive and poetic way, since the beginning. This time, her men were creole sailors, back in port after long voyages at sea. Backstage, she spoke of “looking at a island from a distance,” and “thinking about it from a romantic point of view,” and “the joy of collective belonging.” The prints referenced the work of the African-American artist Jacob Lawrence.If you tossed away the press release, which came with a long bibliography, it’s no disrespect to say it wouldn’t matter. With many designers, the inspiration explication route, the name-dropping of artists, cult films, cultural arcana, and the descriptions of sets, is too often used to fill in for, and distract from the fact of something that is not very good. With Wales Bonner, it’s almost the other way around. Her nautical-themed tailoring, with its short-jacket-to-wider-trouser proportions, her use of gingham check as linings and under-layers, her floppy shirts, and the considered detail of sleeves cut to ruck up at the elbow: None of this needs more information to bolster its value. It is what it is: gentle, classy man–fashion that women can relate to. Someone asked her backstage why there was only one woman in the show; she was wearing one of the beautiful white suits. “Women do buy, anyway,” Wales Bonner replied. “I don’t need to spell it out.” That’s true. Wales Bonner may put herself through a Ph.
D’s-worth of academic reading for her every collection, but she doesn’t need to spell out any of it when the clothes content speaks so well for itself.
8 January 2018
Grace Wales Bonner is so known forher serious, intellectual approachto exploring black male identity that her audience arrives on guard to try to catch every nuance of her meaning. That was just as true today, but this time she had stripped away clues in terms of a set or historically referenced ceremony, or even the decoration which has become one of the identifiers of her clothes. “I was thinking more in terms of minimalism this time,” she said. “I wanted to concentrate on perfecting the cut and the fit, to show it’s a luxury product.”That was far from all that was going on, of course. There was the programWales Bonnerhad handed out, for a start: It contained a printout of a Hilton Als essay aboutJames Baldwin, from a 2016 exhibition catalog at the Artist’s Institute in New York, pictures fromThe Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten, and other research notes. “What I was feeling came much more from literature this season, and these shows I had seen in New York,” said the designer. “So I was thinking about James Baldwin, and the ones who came after who his work enabled; the sons of James Baldwin.” Intellectual exploration, learning, time spent turning over how to represent her responses to male sexuality is, she smiled, “my relaxation.”Be that as it may, what was more than apparent in her results is how much concentration Wales Bonner is putting into refining and mastering the nonintellectual skills demanded by men’s tailoring. Many’s the young designer (and the old, come to that) who can distract attention from the content of a collection by talking up backstories. There was no distraction here from seeing how excellently fitted the slim cargo pants and military trousers were, or how perfectly proportioned the black calf leather suit. Proof that Wales Bonner is just as serious about being a designer as she is a thinker.
10 June 2017
This season there was less of a direct sense of the African ceremonial about Grace Wales Bonner’s show than her audience has become used to. Instead, attendees sat in a circle around a giant stack of speakers, borrowed from the Notting Hill Carnival (the annual celebration thrown by the London Caribbean community)—a symbol which seemed to place Wales Bonner’s collection, named Spirituals II, on the streets of her home city. But Wales Bonner is a deeply centered, meditative personality, and this time she said she was thinking about the power of street-preachers—a theme which made her roaming, allusive imagination turn to explore the impact of populist religious characters throughout time.That partially explained the reference to medieval headgear (made by Stephen Jones) which appeared on the first looks: “I was looking at Renaissance portraiture, friars,” she said. (Friars were itinerant monks of the Middle Ages whose mission was to convert amongst the laity.) “But it’s an abstract connection,” Wales Bonner added. “The way I do things is very emotional.” Another inspiration was shown by a banner she’d pinned up backstage showing a photograph of boys in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, taken by Patrick Cariou in 2002. Wales Bonner spent weeks at the Josef Albers Foundation on a creative retreat in that country last summer.What resulted was the sense of a busy urban scene, and a far broader collection than we’ve seen from Wales Bonner so far. It spanned mens- and womenswear, casual jersey tracksuits, long white linen and lace flounced dresses, passages of her familiar pristine white tailoring, crinkled shirts with crimped black ties and short duffle coats. Who were these people—members of holy sects, Jehovah’s Witnesses, natty local Jamaican boys from Ladbroke Grove in the ’70s? Wales Bonner wouldn’t be pinned down on the specifics. “The whole thing is about celebrating diversity,” she said. What’s certain: There was a lot of detail, handcraft, and hard work on show here, from beaded, checkered skinny T-shirts to leather harlequin-patterned trousers to one of Wales Bonner’s signature velvet suits, set with sparkling crystal embroidery. It’s a quiet cult Wales Bonner has started here, and, one way or another, this collection will gather more believers to her.
8 January 2017
Grace Wales Bonner’s work focuses on black male sexuality, masculine identity, and cultural experience. It makes for rich and unexplored terrain—because of the few black designers who have risen to international prominence (immediate examples being Andre Walker, Stephen Burrows, the late Patrick Kelly), all of whom predominantly design for women. Wales Bonner is designing from her own experience and memories, growing up in South East London with an English mother and a Jamaican father. Her paternal grandfather was a tailor. Her collections feel profoundly, poignantly personal—which is possibly why they resonate for so many.Wales Bonner is 25, but has already received a British Fashion Award recognizing her emerging talent, and is nominated for the 2016 LVMH Prize, despite the fact that her Spring 2017 show was, technically, her first solo outing after a period at talent incubators Fashion East and MAN. That is indicative of London’s current menswear state of mind: Start them young, raise them high, and do it quick. She graduated two years ago.Wales Bonner’s ideas warrant the attention, as her small, well-formed Spring 2017 show proved. She dedicated it specifically to the 1930 crowning of Haile Selassie as emperor of Ethiopia, but in truth it was pan-African, merging ceremonial styles—military decoration, religious attire—with embellishments of crystals and shells and touches of handicraft, embroideries, and crochet. East Africa, West Africa, the Caribbean, and a European view of them all, then and now. A multitude of perceptions, blending into a new reality. The palette was austere and monochrome, polished Sunday best. The focus was tailoring, of the most formal kind—frock coats, tailcoats, brief capes, single-breasted jackets, buttoning high, with shallow vents over narrow trousers. Technically, they’re demanding styles—of any designer, especially one so young. They were adroitly realized.Let’s savor that, for a moment. London’s new breed of designers has moved away from tailoring like this as a means to communicate new and engaging ideas. In fact, fashion as a whole has ditched the suit as a medium of creative expression. To see a designer so young grappling with both this medium and this message is really astounding. Not only that, but Wales Bonner has made these clothes feel both relevant, and desirable, to a new generation of men.To a new generation of women, too.
Some retailers have already purchased the elaborate, richly figured velvet garments from her Fall collection as womenswear, where they will be more readily digested by consumers. In reaction, the savvy Wales Bonner offered a few female-specific styles in this runway show. Yet gender is not just important but fundamental to Wales Bonner’s perception of her clothes—she doesn’t seem the sort to jump on bandwagons, let alone anything so trite as “gender fluidity.” It’s the flamboyance of the decorated male she’s really interested in. But rather than the flash offered by other names, Wales Bonner’s richness doesn’t end but rather begins with the surface. It’s what lies beneath that’s really fascinating.And what’s yet to come. There was much promise in this debut.
12 June 2016