Grace Wales Bonner was born in 1990 in London, to a Jamaican father and an English mother. She studied at Central Saint Martins, graduated in 2014 with a menswear BA, and launched Wales Bonner in 2015. In 2016, at twenty-six, she won the LVMH Prize.

The Premise

Wales Bonner’s argument, consistent across twenty collections, is that the vocabulary of mid-twentieth-century Black diasporic dress — Sam Cooke’s tailoring, Malcolm X’s glasses, Lagos highlife, Rastafari knitwear, the black turtlenecks of the Black Panther cohort, the silhouettes of 1970s Brixton — constitutes a full design canon that has been historically under-read. Her collections, each accompanied by an essay with bibliography, cite specific figures: Ezra Pound meets Aime Césaire; Duke Ellington meets Lord Kitchener.

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Black menswear has its own archive. Ours has been to translate it, not to invent it. — Grace Wales Bonner

The Adidas Collaboration

Wales Bonner’s collaboration with Adidas — notably the Samba re-editions launched in 2020 — has produced the most commercially successful independent designer-sportswear collaboration of the post-Abloh era. Resale prices on her Samba editions routinely triple within a month of release. She has curated exhibitions at the Serpentine and the MCA Chicago. She is thirty-four at the time of writing.