Wales Bonner Meets the Mecca

The majestic court dress of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie. The lively, sumptuous ballrooms of early 20th century Harlem. Alice Coltrane’s metamorphic ashram years in California. These are just a few of the seemingly limitless inspirations that have informed past collections by the English fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner, a wunderkind who, at just 34 years old, has completely transformed the face of menswear itself. Her Autumn/Winter 2024 collection sees the artist turning her razor-sharp eye to the historically Black American learning institution Howard University, for a fanciful encounter with its rich and storied archives, history, codes and traditions.


It all started here: Ms. Wales Bonner founded her eponymous brand back in 2014, shortly after graduating from Central Saint Martins, where her graduate collection, Afrique, won the L’Oréal Professional Talent Award. Even in her youth, her clarity of vision and pristine execution was evident to anyone with a pair of eyes; the year after she graduated, she was awarded Emerging Menswear Designer at the prestigious British Fashion Awards. Rooted in her bicultural heritage—Jamaican on her father’s side, English on her mother’s—the designer’s lush work has emerged as a cerebral exploration of identity, cultural hybridity, and the intersections and parallels of traditions across the diaspora. Her early collections combined sharply-tailored menswear with rich historical and cultural references, earning her a reputation as a quiet yet bold new voice in the contemporary fashion landscape. From the outset, it was clear that the Wales Bonner brand was not simply about creating beautiful garments, but about the rites of storytelling, drawing on literature, music, art, and philosophy to create garments that bring culture and history to vivid, tactile life.

Ms. Wales Bonner’s seemingly boundless creative vision engages with a diverse array of worlds and expresses itself through a multitude of modes and forms—garments, exhibitions, performances, films and publications. Her perspective reflects her deep and serious engagement with the world, and it’s through her stately, sophisticated clothing that the wearer can achieve a deeper understanding of themselves and their place in the world around them. It’s a practice rooted in orienting oneself towards beauty, and treating the pursuit of beauty as a disciplined, spiritual endeavor in its own right.


“I see the spiritual potential in archiving and in spending time with the creations of people who have come before me,” says the soft-spoken designer, reflecting on her famed scholarly research process, which tends to encompass critical theory, composition, literature and historical texts. “I think a lot about assemblage and how to arrange things intentionally in relation to each other. For me, working through archive material is a kind of devotional practice that enables me to access the sentiments and attitudes of different generations; it makes me feel guided on a personal level.” The output of her namesake brand explores how clothing can serve as a powerful expression of ideas, sensibilities, cultures, and moments in time. Each of her runway collections is accompanied by an extensive bibliography—a simple, elegant gesture that invites others to participate in the rigorous intellectual journey that drives her creative output and funds the luxuriance of these garments.

Dream Study, the title of her Howard University-inspired fashion collection, and its accompanying publication, Howard Universal, emerge from what Ms. Wales Bonner describes in her show notes as a “rich interaction with Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center”—the largest and most comprehensive repository of books, documents, and ephemera on the global Black experience. Where past Wales Bonner collections have gracefully weaved in varied inspirations from the university and its alumni, this project in particular feels like the inevitable culmination of a profound, ongoing inquiry. It coalesces years of research and imagination into a singular body of work.

As a central gathering point for generations of ambitious young Black folks from across the nation (and beyond), Howard can take on the form of a cultural laboratory, in which disparate ideas, styles and gestures intermingle and take on whole new forms. Howard is a prime example of the role that style can play in expressing one’s dignity, self-possession, and creativity. Such campuses—where social, political, and cultural identities are just beginning to bloom—are petri dishes for lavish experiments in the fashioning of self. When describing his first visit to the Howard campus, Brock Boyd, a marketing student, found himself moved by what he saw. “One thing I noticed was how well put together everyone was,” he says, a linger of awe tracing his voice. “People my age, that looked like me, looked like they were going places.”

The Dream Study collection itself draws from varied aspects of Howard’s unique texture of collegiate life. Varsity blousons with stitched ‘WB’ crests and sleeveless crew sweaters nod to the legacy of the athletics department. Crewnecks emblazoned with the Howard logo draw from the school’s official iconography. Formalwear, made in collaboration with Savile Row tailors Anderson and Sheppard, evoke the iconic American tradition of homecoming. The styling of the runway show, staged in the halls of the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris, bespeaks Ms. Wales Bonner’s enduring fascination with the way gestures of style can give physical form to abstract ideas and feelings. Shirttails, cuffs and collars overflow from beneath the jackets and sweaters that entomb them. The hems of voluminous pants and jeans skim the ground just so. What we’re left with is an evolved perspective that sidesteps the usual manicured preppiness and ossified visions of collegiate style, an elevated vantage point that drives it towards a more sensuous, cerebral and refined realm.

A deep sensitivity and sense of responsibility emerges as one flips through the materials in the publication, which is as rich and evocative as the collection itself. A limited edition newsprint publication with multiple inserts, it includes submissions from students past and present, reprints of archival materials and newly created texts and images. On one page, a testimonial from ambient music pioneer and Howard alum Laraaji; on another, a poem by the great American author Toni Morrison (Class of ‘53). A standout amongst these contributions from past and present students is a stunning photograph by Maiz Lawson, who graduated from the film program last year. In it, a young man, sporting a purple t-shirt and a black White Sox hat, covers his face with his hands, his neck draped in a gold rope chain with a large cross pendant. The cross catches the blinding light of the sun, turning a gesture of spirituality and style into an image of exaltation.

Such moments emerge from Ms. Wales Bonner’s commitment to including a plurality of perspectives in the work. “For me it is important to have a multiplicity of voices around an image, which in this publication comes from the different contributors who have submitted work,” she says. “I was aware of my position as an outsider [the designer is British; the school is American] and these student and alumni submissions helped to create something self-explanatory. It was about resisting a singular perspective to avoid an overly romanticized outlook.”

In Grace Wales Bonner’s world, research and education become acts of devotion—a form of spiritual inquiry. To look with love, to look in search of beauty and depth, are vulnerable and radical acts in an age defined by fleeting trends and unbridled consumption. The broader Wales Bonner project presents a vision of luxury fashion where context and deep meaning hold greater value than opulent materials or intricate techniques. In this sense, the project resembles an art practice more than a conventional fashion label. Or rather, it reimagines the expressive possibilities of fashion, pushing its boundaries to become something more profound. It puts a way of being in the world that seeks out the narrow slices of beauty and cleaves them open for all to witness.

As seen in Justsmile Issue 5, available to purchase here.

Text Jonathan Jayasinghe

Images courtesy of Wales Bonner

PUBLISHED: February 9th 2025