Why Grace Wales Bonner's Appointment as Hermès Menswear Creative Director Matters
PARIS, France — As creative director Véronique Nichanian presented her final collection for Hermès during Paris Fashion Week for the Fall / Winter 2026 season, our minds couldn’t help but reflect on the incoming ascension of Grace Wales Bonner, who will formally present her first collection as Menswear Creative Director for Hermès in 2027.
At the time of the announcement, the flurry of media coverage of such an esteemed appointment was rather positive considering the relative dearth of press for Bonner’s eponymous brand since its founding in 2014. Bonner has demonstrated a go big or go home approach to managing her own label, racking accolades as meaningful as the LVMH Prize in 2016 (first individual woman to win, no less) and the British Fashion Council’s Menswear Designer of the Year Award in 2024, as well as securing a globally renowned partnership with sportswear giant Adidas. All the while, her quietly confident take on menswear consistently dressed a cohort of influential inner circle names who only continue to rise in acclaim — let’s take a look at a few notable standouts from the past decade.
— Lewis Hamilton
British racing car driver Lewis Hamilton is no stranger to Bonner’s oeuvre, with support by his loyal stylist Eric Mcneal. Hamilton, who would later co-host the 2025 Met Gala Superfine: Tailoring Black Style wearing a custom WB ivory look, would surely not underestimate Bonner’s influence on his sartorial icon status.
— kendrick lamar
Most Grammy Award winningest rapper Kendrick Lamar rocked a bespoke hand-embroidered suit and necklace from Bonner’s Twilight Reverie collection while on tour in Kigali, Rwanda in 2023. A purveyor of great taste, Lamar’s selections rarely go unnoticed.
— solange knowles
With a firm focus on menswear, Bonner expanded into womenswear casually and then formally to both dress herself and her growing fan base. Solange Knowles is a repeat subscriber to Bonner’s aesthetic — who can forget the incredible cover of Apartamento, where Knowles brought us into her Los Angeles home poised just so in a Wales Bonner jersey shirt?
— eric n. mack
Visual artist Eric N. Mack, whose latest show Fishers of Men at The Academy of Arts & Letters closes this February, brought us right back to his first installation with Wales Bonner in 2019 when his art hung above the models at London’s Serpentine Gallery. The collaboration between Mack and Bonner went from behind-the-scenes to front stage with a custom look leveraging brocade fabrics last year.
While we anticipate her co-collaborators and A-list acolytes will continue at Hermès, where Bonner represents yet another first, the possibilities are curious and curiouser — perhaps she will expand the universe of Hermès in a way that is as productive as the ideas Bonner contends with in her own practice – will it be history, legacy, and enlightenment or identity, abstraction, and the cultural mélange that dominate her work? Only time will tell.
Keeping her own label as well as leading menswear at a storied house is not for the faint of heart, but certainly not without precedence. Virgil Abloh maintained Off-White while at Louis Vuitton and Jonathan Anderson is handling both menswear and womenswear at Dior and JW Anderson, which has since evolved from mainly ready-to-wear to curated objects.
As critically engaged consumers of her work, we eagerly await Bonner’s January 2027 presentation in Paris and remain comforted in the knowledge that the creative recruitment team at Hermès figured something out that we knew all too well long ago.
Images courtesy of @ericjmcneal, @walesbonner, and Apartamento. Lead Image by Malick Bodian.