Hermès’ New Designer Brings Indie Spirit to Tradition-Rich Brand

Grace Wales Bonner Photo by Dia Dipasupil /Photographer: Dia Dipasupil/Gett

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(Bloomberg) — In a 2019 System magazine interview, Grace Wales Bonner praised menswear designer Raf Simons for being “very uncompromising,” saying “it is a really beautiful thing to see in this era.”

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The quality dear to Wales Bonner is also prized at Hermès, the 188-year-old French luxury house famed for its rigorous and meticulous ways that this week appointed her its new creative director of men’s ready-to-wear collections, making her the only Black woman to lead design at a major European luxury house. The appointment gives the Birkin bag maker a 35-year-old designer known for her unique way of melding fine tailoring with broad cultural research, with a string of awards under her belt. 

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“With Wales Bonner, Hermès will have a creative talent who knows how to mix the exacting standards of Western luxury, which include the utmost attention to craft and quality, with diverse cultural influences whether they’re from Africa, India or the Caribbean,” said Serge Carreira, an affiliated professor of fashion and luxury at Sciences Po in Paris. “She has an idea of beauty that’s very contemporary and singular, as opposed to stilted, with a strong attention to detail.”

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Wales Bonner is replacing Veronique Nichanian, 71, who has held that role for 37 years and will present her last menswear show in January, Hermès said. Wales Bonner’s appointment is part of a large-scale renewal in creative talent at the world’s biggest luxury houses. In just the past year, new designers have landed at Celine, Christian Dior Couture, Chanel, Gucci, Loewe, Balenciaga, Bottega Veneta and Fendi, a changing of the guard that has sometimes coincided with a generational shift.

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For Hermès, the Wales Bonner appointment is something of a novelty. In contrast with other fashion labels that sign on designers who are stars in their own right, Hermès has traditionally cultivated a strong artistic culture internally, with very few of its creative directors having reputations that outshine the brand.

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Wales Bonner’s “take on contemporary fashion, craft and culture will contribute to shaping Hermès men’s style,” Pierre-Alexis Dumas, an Hermès heir who oversees the label’s artistic direction, said in a press release this week.

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Wales Bonner, born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father, is the founder of her eponymous label and one of the masterminds behind the runaway success of Adidas AG’s retro three-striped Samba trainers. Her rise on the global fashion scene has been meteoric.

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Right after she graduated from London’s prestigious Central Saint Martins in 2014, she created her menswear line Wales Bonner, soon racking up plaudits for her work. She won the ‘Emerging Menswear Designer’ at the British Fashion Awards in 2015, followed by the LVMH Young Designer Prize in 2016. She was the winner of the British Fashion Council/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund in 2019, the same year she curated an exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries in London that explored rituals and religious practices in Afro-Caribbean cultures. She has dressed the Formula-1 driver Lewis Hamilton for the Met Gala.