There’s always plenty of long-term legacy celebration in Paris, but the fact Grace Wales Bonner’s label has already spanned a decade crept up quietly. In actual fact, she founded it in 2014 after her graduation from Central Saint Martins, but it was 2016 that she presented her first designs formally, within a fashion show. While for many designers a shift to Paris – whether we Londoners like it or not – pushes a designer’s work to a new global audience, Wales Bonner already had that. The singularity of her approach garnered plaudits from within fashion and beyond: it’s interesting that Wales Bonner has steadfastly refuted boundaries. In 2019, she presented her first institutional art exhibition, A Time for New Dreams, at London’s Serpentine Gallery. She presented a fashion show around it, at one point, but that wasn’t the point for either her, or indeed that gallery. Today, the cast of her Spring/Summer 2026 show included Bobby Gillespie’s son Wolf, Lennon Gallagher and the Arsenal footballer Myles Lewis Skelly – how’s that for a culture-spanning trip? It’s reflected in her client base, too.
Befitting an anniversary, this collection was a re-assertion of what Wales Bonner stands for – precision in tailoring, a focussed point of view, and touches of flamboyance. Here, those included jewelled pins at chest or waist, worn like military decorations or maybe talismans to ward off evil. Off the back of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Exhibition Superfine: Tailoring Black Style – the catalogue of which features, on its cover, a sharply cut outfit by Wales Bonner, the designer delved deeper into the theme. Her collections are always a combination of her Carribean-British roots – this time, she turned to steadfastly British sources, creating tailcoats with the King’s tailor Anderson and Sheppard, slender coats with the Crombie company, and knitwear with John Smedley. But the mix was utterly Wales Bonner’s own, something she has asserted as her signature across the unspooling of a decade.
Wales Bonner showed this season in the library of the Lycée Henri-IV – which was appropriate. Really, you had to earnestly and scholarly ‘read’ these clothes to fully understand them. The displacement of buttons on a slender, single-breasted jacket with a high lapel break; the crystal buckles on a patent shoe contradicting an otherwise sombre suit. Focus in on the details. She talked about “inherited ideas”, and these showed the shifting and subtle switching of ideas within the small lifespan of her company, a gradual evolution and development of aesthetic, a slow burn. There’s something fascinating about seeing a young talent steadfastly remove herself from the retrace that characterises the churn of fashion today and develop her own world with such purity and … well, grace. I guess it’s in the name.
