Earlier this year, as Grace Wales Bonner staged her latest runway show, her first in Paris, careful observers could glimpse all the elements of a major player in the menswear firmament coming into view. A baller venue: the ornate salons of the 18th-century Hôtel d’Évreux at Place Vendôme. A VIP-studded front row. An Adidas collab, including jerseys for the Jamaican national soccer teams. Down the runway, she also sent debonair dinner jackets, leopard-print babouches, and cowrie-shell-embroidered trousers, all emblematic of the Afro-diasporic style she’s become famous for. It was the grandest expression of her powerful vision yet and one of the finest collections of the entire season.
The soft-spoken designer is comfortably at the leading edge of menswear’s next generation of creatives. Her trophy cabinet is already running out of space. Since launching her brand, called Wales Bonner, in 2015, the 32-year-old South London native has won just about every important fashion prize there is. But no industry accolade can express just how electrifying her exploration of identity and the Black experience is right now. She is, certainly, one of the most talented fashion designers of the moment, and smart money would bet on her achieving her goal of developing Wales Bonner as a long-term project, with an aim, she said, of “bringing an Afro-Atlantic spirit in European luxury.” That is, in her words, “to establish a luxury house that represents a broader cultural perspective.” That vision is more convincing now than ever, in part because of how confidently, exuberantly collaborative she is.
“I’ve never designed in isolation,” she told me over tea earlier this year in New York. Her creative process involves a prolific exchange of ideas that is pushing her menswear into important new dimensions. “Behind creating clothing is this idea of thinking about research as an artistic or spiritual practice, which is something that feeds into everything I do.” She might just as easily have wound up in a painting studio at Central Saint Martins, the famed London art school where she graduated from the fashion design program. In fact, she studied womenswear before finding her voice in menswear (the first garment she ever designed, in secondary school, was a “sculptural” dress.) But Wales Bonner finds clarity in clothes. “I see clothing as my most direct mode of communication,” she said.
Wales Bonner’s spirited and wide-ranging approach to making garments both simple (striped rugby shirts) and complex (tailored suits in dapper silhouettes) has led her to work with masters of various fields: luminaries like the poet Ishmael Reed, the painter Kerry James Marshall, and Kendrick Lamar, as well as emerging stars, like multimedia artist Eric Mack, and the photographers Nick Sethi and Tyler Mitchell. (Sethi and Mitchell are pictured in these pages with a group of her friends and mentors who figure into her work.) It is plain to see why many of her influential artist friends see her as one of them. “I honestly look at her making a suit for me as almost like buying a painting from an artist,” said Mitchell, who took these photos.
One particular moment in Paris stood out as a strong counterpoint to the superficial and commercial art collaborations that are flooding fashion: a high-collar blouse emblazoned with a dignified portrait painted by Lubaina Himid, the Turner-prize winning British artist. Presented without fanfare, the portrait by Himid, of a young man wearing a dash of yellow eyeliner, hints at the multifaceted and uncategorizable image of Black masculinity Wales Bonner seeks to reflect in her work. An image that is “refined, sophisticated, elegant—a gentle depiction, but also an expansive way of being that is complicated and not fixed,” as she put it to me. It was one of the most beautiful garments in the show. “When Grace thinks about her collaborations with artists, it’s not just about putting an image on a piece of cloth, but it’s also about this other level of thinking around Black community, with how the image might operate,” said Antwaun Sargent, a curator, critic, and Gagosian director.
Wales Bonner frequently taps artists to flush out a rich world for her clothing, too, the kind that can generate a seductive aura around a pair of slacks. “Her sonics are otherworldly,” said the playwright Jeremy O. Harris. “The way in which she creates a sonic landscape for her clothing is something that should be studied and written about for a long time.” In Paris, the soundtrack featured “United in Grief” by Kendrick Lamar, with an added voiceover that included a powerful intonation: “Wales Bonner / the individual.”
Wales Bonner had been thinking, she told me backstage after the show, about people like James Baldwin, reminiscent of the Black flaneurs in Paris, who found a new form of freedom during their years in the city. Like many of her ideas, having Lamar contribute resonated on multiple levels. It was, of course, a big flex that spoke to the level of trust she’s developed with artists of his caliber. It also connected the historical dots that inspired the collection with the present. “I was trying to think about who are the contemporary artists who have that spirit of freedom of expression and individuality, and who are the pioneers in their time,” she said. Once the applause died down, you could almost hear the department store buyers in the crowd opening their order books.
Wales Bonner seems to be coming to terms with her position as a fashion and art world star. She is in demand on the museum- and university--lecture circuit, and sometimes has to attend to more superficial matters, like when a man asked her to sign his Adidas x Wales Bonner sneakers at an event in New York. “I’ve never had to do that before,” she said. Now her task is to convert the hype into the architecture of a generational brand. The consensus is that there are no limits on just how far her work—not just her clothes, but every aspect of her practice—could go. “I think that the fact that I can see Wales Bonner being one small part of the Grace Wales Bonner retrospective in 15, 20 years at MoMA is significant,” said Harris. “I don’t think you can say that about very many other fashion designers. This is an artist who has a hunger to reexamine the world through as many mediums as possible. And I’m really excited to walk through that museum with her.”
Samuel Hine is GQ’s fashion writer.
A version of this story originally appeared in the April/May 2023 issue of GQ with the title “A Time for Grace”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Tyler Mitchell
Hair by Dre Demry-Sanders
Makeup by Kuma using Mac Cosmetics
