In an poignant addendum to the game of designer musical chairs that’s swept up the luxury fashion world in recent months, British designer Grace Wales Bonner has been tapped as the new creative director of men’s ready-to-wear at luxury French label Hermès.
The appointment, quickly announced Tuesday morning on the heels of the departure of longtime menswear designer Véronique Nichanian, comes as both a welcome surprise for a fashion industry that celebrates Wales Bonner’s designs and a supposition for a media crowd that has long speculated on the designer’s ascension to a role at a major fashion house.
“I am deeply honoured to be entrusted with the role of Creative Director of Hermès Men’s Ready-to-Wear. It is a dream realised to embark on this new chapter, following in a lineage of inspired craftspeople and designers,” said Wales Bonner in a release from the brand.
A graduate of London’s illustrious Central Saint Martens College, Wales Bonner has developed a name for herself via her eponymous brand, which she founded in 2015, built a reputation as one of the most precocious purveyors of a distinctive and thoughtful commercialism in recent memory.
Casual consumers will most likely recognize her ongoing collaborations with Adidas — the designer’s cult Samba has been credited as one of the main re-energizers powering the brand’s recent explosion — but admirers and fashion fans alike are just as reticent to celebrate her mainline collections, which have historically leaned on ’70s-era inspiration and a considered dancehall aesthetic to masterfully blend a cultivated vision of modern-day London style. (Recent collections have proved out as darker and, curiously, preppier.)
Commercial success aside, Wales Bonner (the brand) cuts a rare figure as an object of criticism; in an often cutthroat environment, the brand has remained relatively unscathed throughout its existence. It has, however, won Wales Bonner (the designer) a litany of plaudits and awards, including the prestigious LVMH Young Fashion Designer Prize in 2016. Notably, she also heavily featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s most recent annual fashion exhibit, Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.
Telegraphed as it may have been, the announcement of Wales Bonner’s appointment is a shock to an insular and slow-changing system that’s skewed both male and white; born to a Jamaican father, she is set to become the first-ever Black woman to head up creative design at a major fashion label.
Given her prediction for craft and her imperious track record, Wales Bonner’s success at Hermès seems all but guaranteed, but, as if further proof of concept was required, it seems that her appointment was all but predestined. Along with the mass of praise and championing on social media, word has quickly spread that Wales Bonner seemingly manifested the career move for herself in a 2019 interview. Perhaps dreams do come true — for phenoms, at least.
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