The elaborate bibliographies distributed before every Grace Wales Bonner show are legendary in the fashion world – and the LVMH prizewinner’s autumn/winter 2021 menswear collection is her most distinctly literary yet. (Take the athleisure top emblazoned with the phrase: “Grace Wales Bonner x Adidas Originals Literary Academy”, part of her latest buzzy collaboration with the athletics giant.) The final instalment in a triptych inspired by Caribbean culture, the presentation follows an autumn/winter 2020 showcase nodding to Afro-Caribbean fashions in ’70s London and a spring/summer 2021 presentation devoted to ’80s dance halls in Jamaica. Wales Bonner’s latest joyful range of tailoring, knitwear and accessories, meanwhile, pays homage to the wardrobes of Caribbean poets and Afro-Caribbean students at Oxbridge through the decades.
Among her chief references? Barbadian scholar Kamau Brathwaite, an academic titan and founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement in the late ’60s, who passed away at the beginning of 2020. A graduate of both Harrison College, Barbados, and Pembroke College, Cambridge, he’s best remembered for his poetry – particularly his collection The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973), in which he set out to develop unique verse forms that suited the realities of Caribbean life, incorporating Reggae rhythms and Rastafarian idioms in place of iambic pentameter and Queen’s English.
“I was trying to imagine a fictional university that is a lot more multicultural,” Wales Bonner told Vogue of the collection. “Maybe what their team kits for a track program might look like.”
© Courtesy of Wales Bonner
Another key reference point for Wales Bonner? The works of Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, who published his verse in a Saint Lucian newspaper at the tender age of 14 and distributed his first collection, 25 Poems, on street corners around the island. His breakthrough came in 1962, with the release of his Green Night anthology, a powerful reckoning with the legacy of colonialism throughout the Caribbean – a theme he would return to again and again throughout his storied career.
As for the final volume Wales Bonner turned to while putting together her mood board? Pamela Robert’s Black Oxford: The Untold Stories of Oxford University’s Black Scholars – which traces the history of Black students from the matriculation of Sierra Leone-born Christian Fredrick Cole in 1873 onwards.
Time to ditch your old book club and sign up for Wales Bonner’s literary academy instead.
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