Grace Wales Bonner: Tailoring the future of fashion

Since launching her label in 2014, Grace Wales Bonner has been steadily leading the way in contemporary British menswear and womenswear. And she’s done it through an approach that is unapologetically academic.

Whether collaborating with brands like adidas or tailoring tracksuits for the catwalk, hours of research goes into each piece. Her influences are wide-ranging: the prose of American writer and activist James Baldwin, the angular jazz of Thelonius Monk, paintings by Lubaina Himid, the Windrush Generation and, in the case of the three garments in our collection, lovers rock.

The label is stocked at famous London stores like Selfridges and Dover Street Market. Its vision of luxury is understated, sporty and sharply tailored. The pieces could be just as at home on London’s streets as they are on catwalks and in museum collections like ours.

Grace Wales Bonner is a south Londoner, born to an English mum and Jamaican dad. She spent much of her teens travelling across town by bus and being exposed to the city’s many cultural influences. It sparked her unfading interest in the mix of styles in London.

When she was at school, she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to be a historian or an artist. But when she got to leading London arts university Central Saint Martins, it was the pace of their fashion course that caught her eye.

She graduated in 2014 and launched Wales Bonner, initially a menswear brand, the same year. Womenswear followed in 2018.

“I started off with the intention of representing that there is not one resolved idea of Blackness,” she told luxury marketplace Farfetch. “In a sense I aimed to represent a sense of fluidity and infinite possibilities.”

The years since have been a whirlwind. Wales Bonner has won a number of awards, including International Men’s Designer of the Year from the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 2021. She’s worked with the likes of adidas, Dior and Savile Row tailors Anderson & Sheppard. In 2022, she was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to fashion, which is a high-ranking award given by the monarchy.

Cultural and archival research informs all of Wales Bonner’s designs. It could be the sounds of Notting Hill Carnival, Senegalese street style or the notebooks of Gary Fisher, an African American writer who died of AIDS in 1994. The brand connects many disparate dots and translates these stories into its clothes.

“Fashion feels like a way I can explore deeper ideas about identity, ancestors, lineage” she said in an interview with System Magazine. “I came to realise through studying that by creating imagery and collections, I can communicate in a really immediate way.”

Film is also an important part of Wales Bonner’s artistic practice. This includes making cinematic recaps of her collections, or collaborating with artists to create more experimental pieces, such as 2017’s Practice with photographer Harley Weir.

In 2019, she also curated a show, A Time For New Dreams, at the Serpentine North Gallery in Hyde Park, which was themed around magic and spirituality.

For her 2020 Lovers Rock collection, Wales Bonner came back to her London heritage. It was “dedicated to each and every one inna di area… a sweet song to the strength of community”.

The name is taken from a soft, romantic subgenre of reggae that emerged from London’s sound systems and record shops in the 1970s. London-born artist Steve McQueen made his own ode to the genre with his 2020 film Lovers Rock.

Photographs from the era were Wales Bonner’s key references. She was inspired by photographer John Goto’s series of portraits of young, stylish British Caribbeans on their way to lovers rock reggae nights at a Lewisham community centre. And she looked a little closer to home, in the clothes captured in her family photo albums.

The ensemble in our collection, selected with the help of the Wales Bonner studio, consists of three garments: a bomber jacket, tailored trousers and a knitted sleeveless vest.

The jacket and trousers use a fabric known as Pi New Life, made from recycled plastic bottles. And the Jamaica Fair Isle vest, a particularly gorgeous piece, plays on a British knitwear look while using a colour combination associated with Caribbean culture. Spot the colours of the Jamaican flag: black, yellow, green.

Wales Bonner’s collaborations with sportswear giant adidas since 2020 have pushed her stardom even further. The trainers are particularly sought-after. You have Wales Bonner to thank for the revival of the long-overlooked, football boot-shaped adidas Samba in the early 2020s.

These pieces are hot stuff, and the shoes almost always sell out. “Fashion gold dust”, according to Vogue.