Grace Wales Bonner and the Art of Cultural Research
Through exhibitions, books and collaborative projects, Grace Wales Bonner offers a way to read fashion alongside the images, sounds and histories that inform it.
Grace Wales Bonner’s work offers a way to understand fashion through the company it keeps. A garment can be considered alongside a photograph, a piece of music or a passage of writing, each changing how the others are read. Her exhibitions make that relationship especially visible. They provide a documented route into a design practice in which selecting and arranging cultural material becomes part of making.
According to the label’s own account, Wales Bonner launched her brand after graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2014. It began with menswear and expanded into womenswear, placing European traditions in dialogue with African and Atlantic cultural references. That account establishes the brand’s stated position; the exhibitions offer concrete examples of how research can take shape beyond a collection.
Research as a design method
The LVMH Prize archive, which records her 2016 win, describes an early practice concerned with Black masculine identity and informed by literature, critical theory and historical sources. It also identifies Ebonics, presented with Fashion East for autumn/winter 2015, as her debut. Research was already part of the public account of the work at that stage.
Read in this context, a collection becomes an arrangement of relationships: between a designer and earlier images, between a familiar form of dress and the body wearing it, between inherited conventions and different experiences of elegance. This reading gives the references a practical role: they change the questions a viewer can ask of proportion, styling and presentation. It also leaves room for an individual garment to be judged on its own terms.
A gallery made for encounters
At Serpentine in 2019, A Time for New Dreams brought those relationships into a gallery. The institution describes a project combining objects, text, sound, scent, performance and images. Participants included Rashid Johnson, Liz Johnson Artur, Kapwani Kiwanga, Laraaji, Eric N. Mack and Paul Mpagi Sepuya, alongside Wales Bonner. Shrines and practices associated with the Black Atlantic were central to its framework.
The range of contributors matters. An account centred only on the designer would miss the project’s collaborative structure. Serpentine’s documentation presents writing, performance and sustained relationships with other practitioners as integral to her work. The installation consequently offers a useful way to think about authorship: the designer can create conditions for an encounter while the participants retain distinct practices and histories.
Working with an existing collection
A different setting followed at the Museum of Modern Art. Artist’s Choice: Grace Wales Bonner—Spirit Movers, shown from November 2023 to April 2024, gathered nearly 40 works from MoMA’s collection. Its artists included Terry Adkins, Moustapha Dimé, Agnes Martin, Man Ray, Betye Saar and David Hammons. The museum framed the selection around sound, movement, performance and style across the African diaspora and beyond.
The exhibition was organised with MoMA curators Michelle Kuo and Dana Liljegren, with Nick Murphy as a curatorial collaborator. Those credits are part of its meaning as a project. Working within a museum collection requires choices about what becomes visible and which relationships an arrangement makes possible. Here, an established archive supplied the material for a different sequence of attention.
MoMA also published an introduction to the accompanying book, Dream in the Rhythm, by Wales Bonner, together with a reading list and a music selection. These parallel formats gave the project several points of entry. A reader could follow an image towards a text or approach the exhibition through listening, without needing every connection to resolve into one explanation.
Returning to the clothes
Taken together, these projects suggest a productive way to approach Wales Bonner’s fashion: begin with the clothes, then follow the references that the designer and her collaborators make available. A museum exhibition cannot establish how a jacket fits, how a textile wears or how a garment feels. Those remain material questions. It can, however, expand the terms through which a silhouette or styling decision is considered.
The enduring value of this approach is the space it gives to attention. Clothing participates in larger histories while remaining an object someone inhabits. Wales Bonner’s documented movement between collections, exhibitions, books and music makes that relationship available for examination. It asks the viewer to notice how meaning develops through proximity: who is present, what is placed together and which connections remain open.
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