Grace Wales Bonner studies looks backstage at her Florence show in June. The 35-year-old Londoner is the new creative director of menswear at Hermes. Photo: The New York Times
Getting one’s dream job is rare. For British fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner that dream is now a reality.
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 Hermes, was on Tuesday (Oct 21) named creative director of menswear for the prominent French fashion house.
For Wales Bonner, this move is one the oddsmakers of the fashion world have long forecast.
For years, Wales Bonner, who founded her namesake label in 2014, straight out of London’s Central Saint Martins College of Art and has had a long-standing collaboration with Adidas, has been name-dropped as a top candidate any time a major job at a luxury label opened up (she’s been rumoured to be up for top positions at Louis Vuitton and Givenchy).
Her appointment bucks the industry’s current inclination toward creative directors who share two criteria: pale and male.
Wales Bonner, whose father was born in Jamaica, is now the first ever Black woman to lead design at a major fashion house.
Read more: Designer Veronique Nichanian to exit Hermes menswear after 37 remarkable years
In a news release, Pierre-Alexis Dumas, general artistic director of Hermes, praised Wales Bonner’s “take on contemporary fashion, craft and culture”.
More specifically for Hermes, Wales Bonner will take over a position that until last week was one of the fashion industry’s great constants.
Last Thursday (Oct 16), Veronique Nichanian stepped down as artistic director of Hermes’ menswear 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, Nichanian held onto the reins at Hermes.
As she crossed into her 70s, Nichanian continued to design with a sprightly flair, keeping Hermes’ 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. Wales Bonner’s first collection for Hermes will be shown in January 2027.
Beyond being young and British, Wales Bonner is a very different sort of designer from Nichanian.
Cerebral and soft-spoken, Wales Bonner’s collections pull inspiration from the Black diaspora.
Her debut collection, Ebonics, was a meditation on flared trousers, shawl collar jackets and a knit that read “The Black Genius”.
Like a professor guiding her students, Wales Bonner accompanied images of the collection on the Wales Bonner website with a list of references including Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.
Her academic approach has continued as Wales Bonner became a fixture of the Paris Fashion Week calendar and expanded into womenswear.
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.
A model presents by Grace Wales Bonner in June 14. Her namesake label was founded in 2014. Photo: The New York Times
“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.
Wales Bonner has, over the past decade, achieved wunderkind status. She has dressed F1 driver Lewis Hamilton for the Met Gala and made T-shirts with Solange.
She has won a bevy of design awards and has been appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire.
In 2019, she collaborated with Dior on a macrame reimagining of its stalwart bar jacket and skirt.
Read more: Dior’s pivot point: Can Jonathan Anderson’s rewrite redefine the fashion house?
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 probably made her appealing to a label like Hermes, one of the last remaining independent French fashion houses.
Wales Bonner is, indeed, perhaps best known for her long-standing 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 Hermes wouldn’t mind Wales Bonner minting a hit like that in her new role. – ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
