Her first runway show this week further proved that the designer is bringing London menswear – and the fashion industry at large – what it’s been missing
Grace Wales Bonner is a new kind of fashion warrior. Since her graduation from Central Saint Martins in 2014, her success has been unbridled. First she scored the L’Oréal Professionnel Talent Award for her graduate collection, then made a critically-acclaimed debut at LC:M hosted by Fashion East, before going on to win Emerging Menswear Designer at the BFAs. Not a bad couple of years.
“Spirituals” – the name of her AW16 collection – was shown on a pared-back runway upon which Nigerian-Irish composer Tunde Jegede sat playing the kora, a West African lute. With chocolate brown suede suits and rusty orange knitted tracksuits, trousers climbed high and cinched in above the waist, proffering a 70s silhouette. Throughout, Swarovski crystals embellished the hems of bleached out flared jeans and trousers, dripping from sweetheart collars and dancing across chests. Floppy, crocheted bucket hats featured heavily: apparently evocative of ‘winters in hot climates’. The collection was in part a re-imagining of Sun Ra’s future-bent aesthetic – the artist who claimed he was from Saturn, delivering messages through music on how the future would look – with Wales Bonner successfully translating his visual and philosophical message into profoundly elegant garments.
This season made it more clear than ever that the designer’s work is instilling the London fashion scene with exactly what it is that’s been missing these past few seasons, ever since Meadham Kirchhoff packed away their tree strung with tampons: a politic. While the very act of dressing is political, it is often only personal interpretations of high-end clothes which charge these luxury garments with a meaning – too frequently a borrowed concept is tacked on to the press release of an otherwise commercial collection. Not so for Wales Bonner. In all of her work she has decided to set the agenda straight on the mainstream portrayal of masculinity – specifically black masculinity.
“The designer’s work is instilling the London fashion scene with exactly what it is that’s been missing ever since Meadham Kirchhoff packed away their tree strung with tampons: a politic”
As with all her shows to date, the cast of AW16 was almost entirely made up of black, Asian and mixed race models. In an industry which has been whitewashing the pages of its magazines and the faces on its runways since before the invention of fashion as we know it, this is a rare, and wonderful, feat in itself. But it’s not only in her casting that Wales Bonner is exploring racial representation – the entirety of her work is underpinned by a progressive exploration of black male identity; both in terms of its public perception, sexuality and gender.
Her shows and the imagery that comes from the brand are positive portrayals of black men: they depict sensitivity, emotionand futurism. Her garments are gentle and lyrical, and she uses them as a way to convey a political message to a fashion audience who are, for the most part, in it for the clothes rather than the agenda. Her design talent is something of a Trojan horse; audiences are first drawn in by the beauty of her creations, and then are able to engage with the politics woven into them. But unlike the Greeks, Wales Bonner isn’t hiding anything: she’s not intimidated to fill a press release with references that many won’t be familiar with; she educates her audience, confronting their assumptions.
Initially one could think this problematic: why is this cultural field her’s to draw from? But growing up in South London, with an English mother and Jamaican father, Wales Bonner has said that she always felt a pressure to prove her heritage. What we are seeing on the runway is the personal being political: the young designer is exploring her own identity through problematising her audience’s perceptions of it. And beyond personal experience comes a lot to back it up: decisions are rooted in academic histories and critical theories of the colonial portrayals of blackness as both the ‘other’, as regressive, and as brutish (indeed, in fashion it feels like not much has changed: enter Wales Bonner). Self-defining artistic, cinematic and literary narratives from artists of colour are also incorporated into her design process.
“Talking about anything actually political when the world is watching can be terrifying – but Wales Bonner is an example of someone who is doing it right”
In fashion, we tend to see offensive, misplaced cultural appropriation or a complete ignorance of cross-cultural references – both design-wise and in casting. Perhaps this is why no other designer on the menswear scene has explored race in such a successful way, or even at all for that matter. There are, indeed, a lot of potholes down which one can fall in bringing these ideas into a fashion context, especially when everyone is trying to sell to the wealthy and, most often, white elite. Talking about anything actually political when the world is watching can be terrifying – but Wales Bonner is an example of someone who is doing it right: it’s personal, it’s incredibly well researched, and the clothes themselves are gorgeous.
People say that it is hard to do something brand new, but this is in fact what Grace Wales Bonner is doing for men’s fashion. She’s proving that there is a way for fashion to meaningfully engage with issues of race, culture and identity. Her AW16 “Spirituals” collection – in part based upon ‘choral harmonies sung by African slaves in the United Sates’ – blends histories of oppression and futurism. Just like Sun Ra’s music, these choral songs were used to ‘defy corporal suffering and escape into the spirit’. Wales Bonner is using her platform to bring discussions around race and masculinity to the fore – both within fashion and without – with the transcendental nature of her latest show serving to depict a more positive, hopeful future. One which Grace Wales Bonner, in fashion, will no doubt be pioneering.
