Grace Wales Bonner
Grace Wales Bonner, the London-based menswear designer, has been described as “one of the most promising newcomers in the world of fashion” by Business of Fashion. She was a recipient of the 2016 LVMH Young Designer Prize, CFDA International Men's Designer of the Year in 2021 and the BFC/GQ Designer Fashion Fund Award most recently. In 2022, she was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire, and she currently serves as the Head of the Department of Fashion Design at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. She has, in addition, this summer curated the MoMa’s Artist’s Choice Exhibition; ‘Spirit Movers’. There’s not much she can’t do.
Courtesy of Hypebae
Her BA Collection ‘Afrique’ won her the L'Oréal Professionnel Talent Award subsequent to her graduation from Central Saint Martins in 2014. The year following her graduation, Wales Bonner debuted “Ebonics,” her Autumn/Winter 2015 collection, with Fashion East at London Collections: Men. That November, she was the recipient of the Emerging Menswear Designer Award at the British Fashion Awards. As she continued to showcase her work she became further established, and, the following summer, was awarded the LVMH Prize, which comprises €300,000 and a year-long mentorship from the luxury conglomerate’s team.
This sparked the proposal for her debut show in 2019, A Time For New Dreams, in which she curated for the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, which explored the ‘magical resonances within black cultural and aesthetic practices’, according to the gallery. The exhibition was a ‘multi-sensory installation and a series of happenings invite contemplation and activate the spaces of the Gallery through object, text, sound, scent, performance, still and moving image’. According to Hans-Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of the gallery: “Grace is a fashion designer, but she's also a thinker, a writer, an editor. She makes connections between different fields, from music to art.” The gallery also credited Wales Bonner for understanding fashion as a “means of communicating broad and interwoven notions of identity and self-expression.”
Her British and Jamaican heritage is a primary reference point in Wales Bonner’s work. Her currently ongoing MoMa exhibition, “Spirit Movers,” was influenced by a range of art forms. She often aims to explore the transcendent qualities of works, for example sound. She commented, in an interview prior to the opening of the exhibition, “Gesture and the repetitive, rhythmic way of making are embedded in the artworks”. She further explained that, during the curation process, she was “interested in how objects can transform and become something else, or how certain materials can be reinvented or repurposed to have a new life to them.” In her work she has an ongoing focus on aspects of culture through different mediums, from literature and critical theory to music and sports. She further added in her pre-exhibition interview that her creative process in terms of fashion design is “ a combination of different inputs inspiring something … I’m drawn to a sense of style, a sense of elegance, a sense of tailoring and gesture that you probably would recognize in my work.”
Recently, Wales Bonner’s name has gained attention as a result of her recent collaboration with Adidas. She first teamed up with them over three years ago, and her most recent collusion with the ubiquitous “Samba”-- Wales Bonner x Adidas Autumn/Winter 2023, featuring an designs with real fur--an unexpected exotic twist real for Adidas, has “supercharged the Samba,” according to GQ Magazine. The collaboration has also placed her label at the forefront of the current fashion scene.
While at present she is a menswear designer, her attraction has led to the proposal for launching a womenswear line. Her exponential rise to success and the ever-increasing demonstration of her talent is based a lot on her as a creative. She sets out to infuse intellectual elements into fashion, as well as political, philosophical, and cultural theory. The uniqueness of Wales Bonner and her work lies in her ability to draw influence from various mediums - objects, sounds, textures and words. She curates entire worlds on which her designs are based. Through cultural and intellectual approaches, lasting elegance, authenticity and sensitivity, Wales Bonner is undeniably shaping the world of fashion and the significance of the creative process.
Article by Alana Courtney-Gleeson, Contributor, PhotoBook Magazine
Tearsheets by Chenglin Qu, Graphic Design Intern, PhotoBook Magazine
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