How Wales Bonner became a cultural movement

On an icy evening in mid-January, a devout congregation filed—one in, one out—through the doors of an at-capacity Serpentine Gallery in London’s Hyde Park. The people hadn’t gathered here to lock eyes with performance artist Marina Abramović, or study the acerbic ceramics of Royal Academician Grayson Perry (just two of the legendary names the institution has showcased in recent years). They were here for the opening of A Time For New Dreams—the multidisciplinary, multisensory exhibition curated by polymath menswear designer Grace Wales Bonner.

Since that opening night, the show has drawn in 25,000 visitors and extended its run by a month to March 17; there are plans for an international tour, too. On Sunday, the space also doubled as a venue for the 28-year-old’s autumn/winter 2019 collection. While the world may be getting familiar with Wales Bonner’s aptitude for tailoring, which has seduced Phoebe Philo and Karl Lagerfeld (both were on the judging panel that awarded her the LVMH Prize for young designers in 2016), the exhibition peels back the lid on her exhaustive research processes, voracious appetite for knowledge and prolific approach to collaboration, which have seen her work with the likes of FKA Twigs and Blood Orange.

“I was so amazed, when we met, by her almost-renaissance practice,” Hans-Ulrich Obrist, the Serpentine’s artistic director, tells Vogue. He first worked with Wales Bonner in 2015, a year after she’d graduated from Central Saint Martins, on the gallery’s Transformation Marathon programme. “Rather than present a collection, she asked two musicians from Burkina Faso to perform in her clothes,” he recalls. “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. It’s very important to break down these silos of knowledge and make the world more porous.”

Taking its name from a collection of essays by Nigerian writer Ben Okri, the exhibition, in Wales Bonner’s words, “looks at ways that spirituality is manifested in black cultural and aesthetic practices, and how that transfers across the Atlantic”. It comprises work by several artists, as well as herself, arranged in independent installations or “shrines”, which Wales Bonner has been thinking of as “portals into other times and other worlds”. Threaded between them, Okri’s words and invocations are printed on the wall to bring a sense of connectivity.

On the west side of the gallery, a video installation of an interview with Okri plays on loop, in-between footage of American poet Ishmael Reed. Above it reads the text: “Breathe the air of those brave ancestors; they were the ladders to new worlds”. “It’s about honouring people like Reed and Okri, who have shaped our present reality, and creating connections between them and artists I’ve worked with in the last few years—like Eric N Mack, Paul Sepuya and Chino Amobi,” Wales Bonner explains when we meet at the gallery. She’s wearing an oversized blue striped shirt, black trousers and cowhide mules of her own design in collaboration with Manolo Blahnik.

But what of the much-anticipated AW19 collection? The themes explored in the Serpentine exhibition weren’t so much transposed as developed in tandem with Wales Bonner’s runway presentation, entitled Mumbo Jumbo (after Reed’s work of historical fiction about race in America). “With the collection, there were two figures I had in mind,” Wales Bonner says, as we approach another one of her shrines—a stack of speakers playing ‘Ain’t Got Time To Die’ sung by the Howard University chamber choir. “One is the idea of a black intellectual,” she continues. This led her to research 1980s yearbooks from Howard University (a historically black university in Washington, DC), while honing in on the clothes worn by writers like Okri and Reed. “I often find with black intellectuals there’s quite a specific style,” she adds. “It’s tailoring, but incorporating found elements collected from different places around the world. I see the way they accessorise sometimes, like with scarves; there’s kind of a delicacy to it.”

The second figure is “the idea of the artist as shaman”. Referencing artists like David Hammons and Betye Saar, Wales Bonner studied the ways magic and ritual can be communicated through dress. When combined, just like the exhibition, Wales Bonner’s AW19 collection traces spirituality in Africa, through the Caribbean and America and back to Africa again.

Those ideas translate into indelibly American garments, like varsity jackets, appliquéd with talismans and moons. A Wales Bonner trademark font spells out “St James” in goldwork embroidery—a homage to outsider artist James Hampton (1909–1964), who, working as a janitor by day, secretly built an assemblage of religious art from scavenged materials like jam jars, cardboard boxes and foil. Her signature slim-cut tailoring has been broadened, with gently rounded seams. This season’s tuxedo jackets in white and black silk wouldn’t look out of place at an Ivy League graduation ball, only with those added “found elements”—a shell and coral brooch, feather trims inserted along the pocket welts—to “imbue them with a sense of magic”. Wales Bonner describes it as a “quite classic” collection, which is “more about the individual garments – cardigans, corduroy trousers and jeans—than full looks”, as has been the case in the past. Look closer, though, and even the “WB” logos embroidered onto shirts and back pockets have been designed to look like voodoo vévés (symbols).

A lynchpin of the collection is a jacket designed in collaboration with artist Eric N Mack, who has worked with Wales Bonner on her runway sets since AW18. Composed of repurposed silk scarves, this coat of many colours and patterns could be one of Mack’s exhibition installations. Bearing a resemblance to the Mande textiles of West Africa, this is wearable artwork, drawing on the ideas of historian Robert Farris Thompson, who researched the visual interpretations of rhythm in weaving patterns. “It’s something I’ve always been interested in, how to communicate sound visually,” Wales Bonner says. “Eric’s work has as quite a specific rhythmicality to it; the way the pieces are assembled and woven has its own musicality.”

Wales Bonner is uncompromising about how her and her collaborator’s work is communicated. “It’s my intention for there never to be a hierarchy between different disciplines, practitioners and people,” she says. This awareness is manifested in her sensitive curation of A Time For New Dreams. Every element is given room to breathe – creating “a place for meditation and reflection”—and the numerous live performances (spoken word from poet James Massiah, movement from dancer MJ Harper, to name but two) that have taken place in the exhibition offer multiple levels of artistic engagement. As France returns artworks to Benin that were looted from the West African state during colonial times, it marks a turning point in curatorial practice. Institutions are looking for new ways to tell stories and the public is in search of new ideas. If the success of A Time For New Dreams is anything to go by, Wales Bonner might just have the answer.

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