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.”
