Grace Wales Bonner is a British fashion designer, whose work "addresses the politics of identity, sexuality, and race through projects that delicately balance multinationalism with a sense of personal subjectivity". In 2014 she founded the London-based label Wales Bonner, originally specialising in menswear. The recipient of several awards, she was voted number 41 on the Dazed 100 list in 2017.
Biography
She was born in south London to a white English mother and Jamaican father, and after her parents' separation was brought up between her mother's house in Dulwich and her father's in Stockwell. Wales Bonner studied at Central Saint Martins, graduating in 2014, and winning the L'Oréal Professionnel Talent award for her BA collection "Afrique". Subsequent awards she has received include the "Emerging Talent – Menswear" at the 2015 British Fashion Awards, the 2016 LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers, and the British Land London emerging design medal in 2018. In 2019 she curated her debut show, A Time For New Dreams, for the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, seeing it as "a space for meditation and reflection... to connect with ideas of history and ancestor’s lineage, but it's also very global and open in its approach, so it's more of a place to reflect on how engaged with ideas we are both physically and bodily but also mentally and spiritually." The exhibition, which attracted 25,000 visitors, took its name from a collection of essays by Nigerian writer Ben Okri, and included work by several artists, featuring Okri's words on the wall, as well as footage of African-American writer Ishmael Reed. According to Hans-Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Gallery: "Grace is a fashion designer, but she’s also a thinker, a writer, an editor. She makes connections between different fields, from music to art." In 2019, Anna Wintour named her as one of the "new, young designers that she's excited about right now" when asked by Rihanna in a special edition of Vogue Magazines "ASK ANNA".
