Grace Wales Bonner’s contribution to fashion exists between her hyper-focus on making exceptional garments—she’s risen as an originator of Black elegance who never messes around with conceptual unwearables—and the contextual exploration that radiates around them. Quietly, she’ll reveal a lookbook—which is what’s happening this season—and then she’ll suddenly explode into some kind of fashion-adjacent cultural community activity, as she’s done before in museums, galleries, and a church.
Sure enough, though, her decision not to show this month means Wales Bonner is pacing herself for something important to come: an extended celebration of her 10th year. “It’s a good moment to pause and reflect. There’s a lot of multidisciplinary events happening,” she said on a Zoom call from her London studio. There will be some form of music-based happening in March, and a show in June. She wasn’t giving anything away about what, where, or with whom, but “Wales Bonner is a multidisciplinary brand and we show up in different places.”
The collection we’re looking at here revolves around her collaboration with the artist Theaster Gates. “I find him inspiring as a friend and a kind of thought partner—and someone that's achieving something to a really high standard of quite immaculate taste,” she said. “I’m thinking more about the elegant dressing I’m drawn to.”
Specifically, she worked with photo-prints derived from Gates’s vast archive of the Black imagination he has collected in Chicago. Part of it houses sets of Ebony and Jet, a bequest from the Johnson family who published the highly successful Black fashion, style, and politics magazines in the era of Civil Rights and the Black Power movements. Wales Bonner’s choices of fashion images of ’60s women are printed on t-shirts, shirts, and denim.
Gates is a mentor she reveres for blazing a trail across the arts and social activism. “He sets a very strong example about allowing your vision to kind of expand into all these different forms. I find him a really inspirational person, because he’s got a very expansive vision that extends from poetry to architecture to sound. I just really admire that he’s got a very complete and holistic vision. And that he’s also really committed to preserving archives and preserving history in his library. And,” she added. “He also has a very, very refined sensibility and approach to dressing.”
