The street is peaceful. Not a fashion logo in sight. To meet Grace Wales Bonner, you have to ring the entrance to a small house, located in the center of London, on the left bank of the Thames, in the De Beauvoir Town district, known for its beautiful properties and its tree-lined streets. . Its inhabitants describe it as a village.
The designer’s studio is located on the first floor of a former 19th century hat factory.e century which housed until 2021 an exhibition room of Arts and Crafts period furniture. She joins us, black sweater and white jeans, hair pulled into a bun, serene face. Grace Wales Bonner exudes a mixture of strength and reserve, which seems to form around her a protective bubble keeping any form of familiarity at bay.
The British designer moved into this place a year ago, transformed by her friend Caius Pawson, founder of the independent record label Young. The latter wanted to create a space where different artists would come together, in the spirit of Black Mountain College, this experimental university founded in 1933 in North Carolina (United States). The basement houses five recording studios, including that of Sampha, a British composer with whom Grace Wales Bonner has already collaborated.
Amplifying Black Voices
The stylist occupies an open space with white walls and a studious atmosphere which brings together less than twenty collaborators. We can see racks of clothes stored at the back, but it is mainly the books that catch the eye. Shelves covered with works of art and design, but also numerous references to black artists and thinkers, from the African continent and the diaspora.
Amplifying black voices has always been of paramount importance to Grace Wales Bonner, who is celebrating ten years of her brand this year. She has never hidden her ambition to create a luxury label, with sophisticated imagery, offering a new cultural perspective; she also cites as an example the work of the African-American painter Kerry James Marshall, who worked extensively for the representation of black people in pictorial art. She has also known for a long time that this is a serious mission, which takes time.
It was in 2014 that the young Englishwoman stood out with her graduation collection at Central Saint Martins College called “Africa”, in which she explored representations of black male identity and sexuality. At the same time, she launched her brand for men and, two years later, she won the LVMH prize thanks to a collection evoking the coronation, in 1930, of the emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie.
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