Grace Wales Bonner

Grace Wales Bonner founded Wales Bonner in 2014 and has made its tailoring, knitwear and sportswear a conversation between British dress and Black Atlantic culture. She also has a long-running Adidas collaboration. Hermès appointed her to lead men’s ready-to-wear in October 2025, succeeding Véronique Nichanian; her first collection for the house is scheduled for January 2027. (Hermès; Central Saint Martins)

The Hermès appointment followed a decade in which Wales Bonner had already established a precise design language. Close tailoring might be interrupted by crochet, cowrie shells or a striped knit drawn from cricket dress; each reference has a history she has studied. The industry also marked the appointment as a first for a Black woman at a major fashion house. (South China Morning Post)

South London, Central Saint Martins and a dissertation about rhythm

Wales Bonner was born in London in 1990 to an English mother and a Jamaican father, and grew up moving between her mother's home in Dulwich and her father's in Stockwell after her parents separated; her father's family had arrived in Britain as part of the Windrush generation, and he impressed on his children how much education mattered. She studied at Central Saint Martins, graduating in 2014. For her dissertation she chose a subject with no obvious place in a fashion syllabus: "black rhythmicality" in the work of the jazz musician Charlie Parker, the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat and the artist Kerry James Marshall, tracing how each folded African tradition into a Western form. The paper won a dean's prize, and her graduate collection took a L'Oréal Professionnel Talent Award. (The Gentlewoman; London Museum)

Her research continues in the cut of the clothes. Wales Bonner works from photographs, music and historical dress, then lets a detail carry the reference: the sleeve of a jacket, the weight of a knit, the placement of a shell. The result wears like a considered wardrobe rather than an illustrated thesis. (The Gentlewoman)

Ebonics, Ezekiel and a language built from two archives

Wales Bonner's first collection under her own name, Ebonics, showed with Fashion East during London's men's fashion week for Autumn/Winter 2015. It looked at how Black men had been depicted in nineteenth-century art and pushed against the stereotyped version of Black masculinity that history had left behind, dressing the point in crushed velvet worked with cowrie shells and Swarovski crystals, high-waisted flares and jewelled skullcaps that pulled together the Harlem Renaissance and 1970s blaxploitation cinema. It won her Emerging Menswear Designer at the British Fashion Awards that November. (Dazed)

The collection that followed her breakthrough, Ezekiel for Spring/Summer 2017, took its title and imagery from the 1930 coronation of Haile Selassie as Emperor of Ethiopia — an event Jamaica's Rastafari movement had already folded into its own theology, and one that connected directly to her father's heritage. Smooth-shouldered jackets with voluminous sleeves and pinched waists met choirboy ruffles, crochet collars and beadwork, restating the label's method: rigorous, linear tailoring worked against silken flou and handcraft that reads as devotional rather than decorative. The LVMH Prize jury, which that year included Karl Lagerfeld, Marc Jacobs and Riccardo Tisci, awarded her its main prize in June 2016, worth €300,000 and a year of mentoring from LVMH executives. (WWD; The Gentlewoman)

Building a house around research rather than seasons

Wales Bonner added a womenswear line in 2018, and by the end of that decade her practice had extended well beyond the runway. In 2019 she curated A Time For New Dreams at London's Serpentine Gallery, an exhibition of Black cultural and aesthetic practice built around artists including David Hammons, Rashid Johnson and Liz Johnson Artur, with a poetry reading by Ben Okri and a piano performance by the novelist Ishmael Reed; it drew some 25,000 visitors. In 2023 she curated Spirit Movers at MoMA in New York, an Artist's Choice exhibition of around forty works exploring sound, movement and style across the African diaspora, accompanied by an artist's book, Dream in the Rhythm. Her design work has stayed close to living artists rather than treating them as reference material: in 2022 she and the painter Kerry James Marshall — the same artist she had written about as a student — released a limited-edition T-shirt capsule, one design built from a new Marshall artwork and the other reproducing a detail of his 1993 painting Lost Boys: AKA Black Sonny, with proceeds going to the anti-incarceration group Study and Struggle. (London Museum; Hypebeast)

The British Fashion Council recognised the label twice more in this period: the BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund in 2019, worth £200,000 and a year of mentoring, and the BFC/GQ Designer Fashion Fund in 2023. Accepting the CFDA's International Men's Designer of the Year award in 2021, Wales Bonner summarised the project in a sentence that still describes it: "the mission of Wales Bonner has been to bring a Black cultural perspective to the highest levels of luxury fashion, to credibly compete with the established European houses in terms of quality, craft, concept." (British Fashion Council; The Impression)

The Adidas partnership and a wider audience

In January 2020 Wales Bonner previewed her first collaboration with Adidas Originals, built into her Lover's Rock collection and reworking the brand's three-stripe tracksuit and Samba sneaker with crocheted stripes and heavier ribbing, drawn from the perspective of Caribbean youth culture in 1970s London and from Adidas's own archive. It became a recurring, seasonal line rather than a one-off drop — later collections added the Superstar and SL72 to the roster — and it introduced Wales Bonner's design language to a far larger audience than the runway alone could reach. She also designed the Jamaica Football Federation's kit for Adidas, giving the collaboration a direct link to her father's homeland rather than a purely aesthetic one. (Adidas News; Hypebeast)

Wales Bonner’s mainline collections often bring British tailoring and school or cricket dress into contact with Caribbean and African references. Long, close jackets sit beside striped knits; velour, needlecord and fine wool acquire new meaning through colour, proportion and small details such as cowrie-shell buttons. (Dazed)

An MBE for services to fashion followed in 2022, and British Menswear Designer of the Year at the Fashion Awards in 2024 confirmed that, a decade in, Wales Bonner's was no longer treated as an emerging label. (London Museum; Business of Fashion)

A menswear house built on Véronique Nichanian's departure

Hermès announced Wales Bonner's appointment as creative director of men's ready-to-wear on 21 October 2025, in a release that named her, alongside her own label's decade of work, the CFDA and Fashion Awards prizes as the case for the job. Pierre-Alexis Dumas, the house's general artistic director, described it as "the start of an enriching mutual dialogue"; Wales Bonner called it "a dream realised to embark on this new chapter, following in a lineage of inspired craftspeople and designers." She succeeds Nichanian, who had led Hermès menswear since 1988 and presented her final collection in Paris on 25 January 2026 to a five-minute standing ovation, closing a tenure of nearly thirty-eight years. (Hermès; CNN)

Wales Bonner is not leaving her own label behind: the appointment runs alongside her continued work as founder and creative director of Wales Bonner, which is how the CFDA and BFC framed her Hermès role from the outset. Her first Hermès collection is scheduled for January 2027, meaning there was, as of September 2026, no Wales Bonner-designed Hermès garment yet in circulation. (Hermès)

Reading and dating the work

Everything carrying the Wales Bonner label to date is her own design, made under one creative director since the house's founding, which makes attribution simpler here than at most houses in this archive — there is no earlier era to mistake it for. The one distinction worth holding onto is between the mainline collections and the Adidas Originals by Wales Bonner line: the latter carries Adidas branding and Adidas product codes alongside the Wales Bonner name, and resale listings sometimes drop one name or the other, which can make an item look like it belongs to a different collaboration or a different year than it does. Checking the specific season name — Lover's Rock, or a later drop's title — against the piece's construction (crochet detailing, the specific sneaker silhouette used) is the more reliable way to date an Adidas collaboration item than the listing text alone.

The more consequential distinction going forward concerns Hermès. Any Hermès men's ready-to-wear piece dated before Wales Bonner's January 2027 debut is Véronique Nichanian's design, regardless of when it was purchased — retail delivery of a final collection can outlast the departure of the designer who made it. A Hermès garment described as "Wales Bonner era" before that date is describing a marketing moment, not a design credit.

References

• Hermès. "Grace Wales Bonner Joins Hermès as Creative Director of Men's Ready-to-Wear." 21 October 2025.
• Central Saint Martins / UAL. "CSM Alum Grace Wales Bonner Appointed Creative Director of Menswear at Hermès." 2025.
• South China Morning Post. "Meet Grace Wales Bonner, who's made history being named Hermès' new creative director." 2025.
• The Gentlewoman. "Grace Wales Bonner." Library profile.
• London Museum. "Grace Wales Bonner: Tailoring the future of fashion."
• Dazed. "Grace Wales Bonner at Fashion East AW15."
• WWD. "Grace Wales Bonner Takes LVMH Prize." 16 June 2016.
• Hypebeast. "Wales Bonner and Kerry James Marshall Join Forces for a Capsule Collection." June 2022.
• British Fashion Council. "Winner of 2019 BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund Announced."
• The Impression. "Grace Wales Bonner Wins 2021 CFDA Award for International Men's Designer of the Year."
• Adidas News. "Wales Bonner Captures Her Own Jamaican Heritage in Our First Collaborative Collection." January 2020.
• Hypebeast. "Wales Bonner's FW20 adidas Collaboration Infuses Heritage With Raw Texture." November 2020.
• Business of Fashion. "Jonathan Anderson, Simone Rocha and Grace Wales Bonner Take Top Prizes at the BFC's Fashion Awards 2024." December 2024.
• CNN. "Hermès veteran Véronique Nichanian's final menswear collection is an ode to longevity." 26 January 2026.