Grace Wales Bonner
Grace Wales Bonner
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Grace Wales Bonner

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Grace Wales Bonner

Grace Wales Bonner (born 1990) is an English fashion designer. Her designs blend sportswear, tailoring and broad cultural research. In 2014, she founded the London-based label Wales Bonner, originally specializing in menswear. In 2025, she was appointed creative director of the Hermès menswear line, succeeding Véronique Nichanian, and becoming the first woman of Black heritage to lead a major luxury fashion house. Wales Bonner's first collection for Hermès is set to be shown in January 2027.

Since founding her eponymous brand, Wales Bonner has won awards including Emerging Menswear Designer at the British Fashion Awards (2015), the LVMH Young Designer Prize (2016), Winner of the British Fashion Council/ Vogue Designer Fashion Fund (2019) and CFDA International Men's Designer of the Year (2021). In June 2022, she was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to fashion. Wales Bonner was the lead of a four year research project at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna.

Wales Bonner was born in South London, England, to a White English mother and Black Jamaican father, and after her parents' separation was brought up between her mother's house in Dulwich and her father's in Stockwell.

Wales Bonner studied at Graveney School in Tooting, then attended Central Saint Martins art school, graduating in 2014, and winning the L'Oréal Professionnel Talent Award for her BA collection "Afrique". Subsequent awards she has received include "Emerging Talent – Menswear" at the 2015 British Fashion Awards, the 2016 LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers, the British Fashion Council/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund (2019), the CFDA International Men's Designer of the Year (2021), Best Independent British Brand (2022) the 2023 British Fashion Council/GQ Designer Fashion Fund, and British Menswear Designer of the Year (2024).

During her studies, Wales Bonner briefly lived in New York in 2013 to assist Vogue fashion editor Camilla Nickerson.

Wales Bonner's debut collection, "Ebonics", was presented in 2015 at Fashion East in London. She presented two runway shows the following year, Malik and Spirituals, after which she was awarded the LVMH prize.

Wales Bonner continued to show her collections in London, until she was invited as guest designer of Pitti Uomo in Florence, Italy, for the presentation of the brand's Spring Summer 2023 collection. Since its Autumn Winter 2023 show, Wales Bonner has exhibited shows on the Paris Fashion Week Men's Calendar.

In 2019, she curated her debut show, A Time For New Dreams, at the Serpentine Gallery, which was an exploration of magical resonances within black cultural and aesthetic practices, and focused on the shrine "as a symbolic pathway for imagining different worlds and possibilities". It was described as "a bringing together of multiple interdisciplinary creative practices: music, fashion, art and design". The exhibition, which attracted 25,000 visitors, took its name from a collection of essays by Nigerian writer Ben Okri, and included work by several artists (including Chino Amobi, the Black Audio Film Collective, David Hammons, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Liz Johnson Artur, Rashid Johnson, Kapwani Kiwanga, Eric N. Mack and Paul Mpagi Sepuya), featuring Okri's words on the wall, as well as footage of African-American writer Ishmael Reed. At the show's opening, Reed performed on piano and Okri recited a poem written for the occasion. According to Hans-Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Gallery: "Grace is a fashion designer, but she's also a thinker, a writer, and an editor. She makes connections between different fields, from music to art." In acknowledgement of the influence of Reed's satirical novel Mumbo Jumbo, Wales Bonner borrowed its title as the name for her Autumn Winter 2019 collection.

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