“Grace Wales Bonner’s subtle integration of different vocabularies has been a signature from the start, and it’s kickstarted her career to a spectacular degree.” – Tim Blanks
Notice: Array to string conversion in /home/delectant/public_html/wp-content/plugins/jetpack/modules/tiled-gallery/tiled-gallery/templates/partials/carousel-image-args.php on line 15Excerpt from the Tim Blanks review for Business of Fashion
LVMH 2016 prize-winner Grace Wales Bonner’s collections have been defined by lush, elegant hybrids of Europe and Africa. For her first stand-alone presentation outside the Fashion East umbrella, she crossed the Atlantic to the Caribbean, a crucible that, in forcing cultures and faiths together in equatorial heat, offered an even more powerful trigger to her imagination.
The scope of Wales Bonner’s vision was defined by the title she gave her latest collection: Ezekiel. His Old Testament prophecies played a part in the elevation of Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, as a new black messiah. Selassie was famously regarded as such by Jamaica’s Rastafarians, which brings us back to the Caribbean. Worlds bridge, as Wales Bonner observed in her shownotes. But worlds also bridged in Selassie’s integration of formal Western dress and his own ceremonial traditions, and that was one of Wales Bonner’s touchstones for her actual designs.
The clothes were a conversation between rigorous, linear tailoring, silken flou and artisanal handcrafts. If there was a sense of one kind of history in a priestly capelet or the line of a long, high-closing coat or the romance of a poet shirt, there was another in the crocheted collar on a black leather bomber, or the crocheted waistband on the trousers of the immaculately precise evening look with which Wales Bonner closed her show.
Gea the full story on BUSINESS OF FASHION
