Wales Bonner is the new creative director of men’s ready-to-wear at Hermès
The British designer has already made history becoming the first Black female design lead at a major fashion house
THE ANNOUNCEMENT THAT British designer Grace Wales Bonner will take the reins a the new creative director of men’s ready-to-wear at Hermès has already made history and it’s only been 24 hours. At just 35, Bonner marks a generational shift at the house, taking over from the legendary Véronique Nichanian, who after thirty-seven years reshaped Hermès menswear into an ode to urban elegance: city-dwelling, quietly sensual, built on movement and light. Nichanian’s man was the modern flaneur, who wandered through the world with grace, each piece honed with a meticulousness that turned function into poetry.
Wales Bonner’s appointment, the first new menswear designer at Hermès in nearly four decades and the first Black woman to take control over design at a major fashion house, signals the next act in that story of refinement.
A London-born designer of Jamaican and English heritage, she has spent the past decade threading together the languages of tailoring, sport and spirituality. Her namesake label, Wales Bonner, founded in 2014, has become a locus of cultural conversation: Savile Row technique meets Afro-Atlantic memory; Adidas sneakers are elevated into artefacts; jazz, literature, and postcolonial history are stitched into her silhouettes.
“I’m interested in jazz and looking at how it introduced African polyrhythms into classical scores, that’s how it works,” she told Esquire UK back in a 2017 profile. “It’s about making space for new forms within structures that already exist. That’s how I position myself.”
For Hermès, a house known for its subtlety and quiet observations of cultural movements, Wales Bonner’s arrival offers the possibility of renewal through reflection. Previous work suggests she will continue the maison’s devotion to savoir-faire, but refracted through her interests with ritual, rhythm and cultural identity.
Where Nichanian’s aesthetic was defined by a lightness of touch, an almost invisible hand guiding the cut of a trouser or the swing of a jacket, Bonner’s sensibility may introduce new textures of storytelling.
Pierre-Alexis Dumas, Hermès’s general artistic director, called her “a take on contemporary fashion, craft and culture [that] will contribute to shaping Hermès men’s style, melding the house’s heritage with a confident look on the now.”
“I am deeply honoured to be entrusted with the role of creative director of Hermès men’s ready-to-wear,” Wales Bonner said in a statement. “It is a dream realised to embark on this new chapter, following in a lineage of inspired craftspeople and designers.”
That lineage, stretching from Nichanian’s quiet intellectual refinement to the house’s broader tradition of craft-led freedom, will now intersect with Wales Bonner’s own universe, one where tailoring is less a uniform than a portal.
It’s an apt summary of what Wales Bonner has always done, melding eras, cultures and disciplines into a serene vision of modern manhood.
When she steps onto the Hermès runway in January 2027, Bonner’s collection will inevitably go beyond being a debut. It will be the meeting of two philosophies: Nichanian’s devotion to ease and Bonner’s devotion to meaning. In that exchange, between motion and meditation, Paris and London, tradition and transcendence, Hermès menswear begins again.
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