5 Reasons Why Grace Wales Bonner Is a Force of Fashion

Next month Grace Wales Bonner will take a panel seat alongside Marine Serre for Vogue’s third annual Forces of Fashion conference. The talented 28-year-old London designer has used her burgeoning label to redefine notions of black masculinity and Britishness while connecting with creative minds across the African diaspora. Her singular vision and exquisite suiting have earned her a host of impressive accolades, including the prestigious LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers in 2016. There are numerous high-profile fans of the brand besides: Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri invited Wales Bonner to create a capsule for the French house, and this past May Meghan Markle chose to wear Wales Bonner for the first official portrait with her husband, Prince Harry, and their newborn son, Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor.

Here, five reasons why Wales Bonner is a force to be reckoned with:

Because she’s challenging the way we think about black masculinity

At once deeply personal and intellectually incisive, the designer’s explorations of black masculinity have shaped the heart and soul of her brand. As supplementary reading to her menswear graduate collection, she submitted “Black on Black,” a 10,000-word dissertation on the work of such artists as Charlie Parker, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kerry James Marshall. (The combined offering would earn her a personal commendation from the dean at Central Saint Martins and the L’Oréal Professionnel Talent Award.) Her gentle representations of black male bodies are a bold and beautiful counterpoint to hypermasculine stereotypes that have dominated the pop-cultural landscape for decades.

Because she represents a new, multilayered British identity

Born to an English mother and a Jamaican father, the designer was attuned to the complicated notion of identity politics long before it was on the fashion agenda. With her own mixed heritage as a point of departure, she traces the far-reaching branches of the African diaspora across space and time. In her fastidious research the rich texts of James Baldwin and the splendor of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie’s wardrobe sit side by side with her own impressions of multicultural London. In this way she has created a new and inclusive framework for what it means to British. That message was inadvertently transmitted across the world when Meghan Markle, a woman who is also changing attitudes toward identity in the U.K., chose to wear Wales Bonner in the first official portrait with Prince Harry and their newborn son.

Because she sees the world through the lens of community

Collaborations are nothing new in fashion, but few manage to forge meaningful creative partnerships in the way Wales Bonner has done. To help realize her vision, she has sought out black thought leaders across a wide range of artistic disciplines and experiences. British art-world star Lynette Yiadom-Boakye wrote a poem for Wales Bonner’s Fall 2017 show; Solange Knowles performed at the designer’s Devotional Sound event in New York this past May; and musician Ishmael Reed played a jazz composition on the piano at her latest show in February. Beyond sharing the stage with bold-faced names, Wales Bonner has used her platform to shine a light on unsung heroes in her community, including musician Brian Jackson, the writing partner of the late Gil Scott-Heron. That spirit of togetherness came full circle when Wales Bonner was invited by Dior’s Maria Grazia Chiuri to collaborate on a special capsule as part of the house’s Resort 2020 collection.

Because she is fiercely independent

As a woman designing in the menswear space, Wales Bonner has steadily beaten her own path with a steely sense of focus. Her creative instincts certainly don’t adhere to any of the old fashion-system rules. Consider that she seduced her female customers with refined and richly embellished menswear suiting seasons before officially launching womens wear; she also switched from showing during the men’s calendar to the women’s in London last season. For her upcoming collection she is presenting in a new format that could take her off the traditional schedule altogether. Whatever the case her new clothes are bound to dazzle her growing global audience.

Because she’s seamlessly integrated the world of visual art into her clothes

As a young woman in high school, Wales Bonner was always torn between two imagined futures: Should she pursue a life as an artist or realize her desire to be a historian? With her eponymous line she may have successfully yoked those two passions to a third. Still, clothes are by no means the only vehicle for her artistic impulses. In recent months art galleries have provided an adjacent space for creative play. Presented at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery earlier this year, A Time for New Dreams was the designer’s first solo exhibition. The title takes its name from a collection of essays by the celebrated Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri, and the show picked up the thread on themes of mysticism and magic within the African diaspora that has existed in her work since the label was launched in 2014.

Grace Wales Bonner is a speaker at Vogue’s 2019 Forces of Fashion conference on October 10 and 11 in New York City; learn more and buy tickets here.

Originally Appeared on Vogue