Getting one’s dream job is rare. For British fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner that dream is now a reality.
Ms. Wales Bonner, a 35-year-old Londoner, who years ago, said in an interview with System magazine that it was her dream to work with Hermès, was today named creative director of men’s wear for the prominent French fashion house.
For Ms. Wales Bonner, this move is one the oddsmakers of the fashion world have long forecast. For years, Ms. Wales Bonner, who founded her eponymous label in 2014, straight out of London’s Central Saint Martins College of Art and has had a longstanding collaboration with Adidas, has been name dropped as a top candidate anytime a major job at a luxury label opened up (she’s been rumored to be up for top positions at Louis Vuitton and Givenchy).
Her appointment bucks the industry’s current inclination toward creative directors that share two criteria: pale and male. Ms. Wales Bonner, whose father was born in Jamaica, is now the first ever Black woman to lead design at a major fashion house.
In a news release, Pierre-Alexis Dumas, General Artistic Director of Hermès, praised Ms. Wales Bonner’s “take on contemporary fashion, craft and culture.”
More specifically for Hermès, Ms. Wales Bonner will take over a position that until last week was one of the fashion industry’s great constants. Last Thursday, Véronique Nichanian stepped down as artistic director of Hermès’ men’s wear division after 37 years.
Even as the pace of designer musical chairs has quickened, with creative directors serving tenures no longer than a presidential term, Ms. Nichanian held onto the reins at Hermès. As she crossed into her 70s, Ms. Nichanian continued to design with a sprightly flair, keeping Hermès’ wealthy male clients on their toes with jewel-toned leathers, blanket-lined parkas and velvety suits. Her final collection for the brand will be shown in Paris in January. Mr. Wales Bonner’s first collection for Hermès will be shown in January 2027.
Beyond being young and British, Ms. Wales Bonner is a very different sort of designer than Ms. Nichanian. Cerebral and soft-spoken, Ms. Wales Bonner’s collections pull inspiration from the Black diaspora.
Her debut collection, titled “Ebonics” was a meditation on flared trousers, shawl collar jackets and a knit that read “The Black Genius.” Like a professor guiding her students, images of the collection are accompanied on the Wales Bonner website by a list of references including “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin and “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison.
Her academic approach has continued as Ms. Wales Bonner became a fixture of the Paris fashion week calendar, and expanded into women’s wear. Black American colleges were the starting point for a collection of “WB” varsity jackets, fair isle knits and duffle coats. The story of a Black member of the Medici family led her to regal stud-collared dress shirts, hourglass cinched blazers and tailcoat-like jackets.
“I see my research as an artistic practice — it really is the foundation of everything I do — and clothing is a very direct way to communicate some aspects,” she told the The New York Times in 2023.
Ms. Wales Bonner has, over the past decade, achieved wunderkind status. She has dressed F1 driver Louis Hamilton for the Met Gala and made T-shirts with Solange. She has won a bevy of design awards and been appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire. In 2019, she collaborated with Dior on a macramé reimagining of its stalwart bar jacket and skirt.
Ms. Wales Bonner has also made an impression beyond fashion, having curated an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and hosted a series of musical performances at London’s Serpentine Galleries, with acts including Sampha and Laraaji.
She has demonstrated a shrewd commercial eye that likely made her appealing to a label like Hermès, one of the last remaining independent French fashion houses. Ms. Wales Bonner is, indeed, perhaps best known for her longstanding Adidas collaboration, in which she artfully riffs on many of the brand’s established styles. See: her silver-tipped version of the Millennium sneaker or her Big Bird yellow version of the mesh SL76 shoe. Most of all, she deserves credit for turning the label’s once-stale Samba sneaker into a must-have. Her versions, in navy croc, leopard and crochet continue to sell for several hundred dollars on resale sites like StockX.
One imagines that Hermès wouldn’t mind Ms. Wales Bonner minting a hit like that in her new role.
Jacob Gallagher is a Times reporter covering fashion and style.
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