{"id":22373,"date":"2026-05-24T02:16:47","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T02:16:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/22373\/"},"modified":"2026-05-24T02:16:47","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T02:16:47","slug":"hermes-appoints-grace-wales-bonner-as-creative-director-of-menswear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/22373\/","title":{"rendered":"Herm\u00e8s Appoints Grace Wales Bonner as Creative Director of Menswear"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article first appeared on Vogue Business<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Grace Wales Bonner is Herm\u00e8s\u2019s new creative director of menswear. The British designer, 35, who created her namesake menswear brand in 2014 and has a longstanding collaboration with Adidas, will present her debut show for the French house in January 2027, Herm\u00e8s announced today. She will succeed V\u00e9ronique Nichanian, who is stepping down after 37 years<\/a>. Nichanian\u2019s final show will be during Paris Men\u2019s in January, and the house will skip fashion week in June. The SS27 collection will be created by the studio.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s understood that Wales Bonner will continue her namesake brand alongside her Herm\u00e8s role.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am really pleased to welcome Grace to the Herm\u00e8s artistic director family. Her take on contemporary fashion, craft and culture will contribute to shaping Herm\u00e8s men\u2019s style, melding the house\u2019s heritage with a confident look on the now. Grace\u2019s appetite and curiosity for artistic practice strongly resonate with Herm\u00e8s\u2019s creative mindset and approach. We are at the start of an enriching mutual dialogue,\u201d Pierre-Alexis Dumas, general artistic director of Herm\u00e8s, said in a statement.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am deeply honoured to be entrusted with the role of creative director of Herm\u00e8s men\u2019s ready-to-wear. It is a dream realised to embark on this new chapter, following in a lineage of inspired craftspeople and designers. I wish to express my gratitude to Pierre-Alexis Dumas and Axel Dumas for the opportunity to bring my vision to this magical house,\u201d Wales Bonner said.<\/p>\n

While industry insiders were betting on a promotion from within, Herm\u00e8s went for a renowned talent. Wales Bonner was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father, graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2014 and established her menswear brand right after (she introduced womenswear in 2018). She has earned numerous recognitions, including the emerging menswear designer at the British Fashion Awards in 2015, the LVMH Young Designer Prize in 2016 and the CFDA International Men\u2019s Designer of the Year in 2021.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s also had a busy year. She returned to the Paris show calendar in June 2025 after her big moment at the 2025 Met Gala. Her opulent velvet suit, encrusted with cowrie shells that were historically used as currency across West Africa, was included in the exhibition. She also dressed co-chair Lewis Hamilton<\/a> alongside FKA Twigs, Omar Apollo, Jeff Goldblum and more. \u201cFor menswear, Paris is basically the place to be. I am speaking a lot about heritage and tradition, so I think Paris is the place where you can have those conversations,\u201d she said. For SS26, she presented \u201c\u200aa proposition for dressing that\u2019s eclectic, a mix between sports heritage, a casual, preppy language, and more fine tailoring. Also coming from the Met Gala and thinking about the idea of Superfine [referring to the theme of the Costume Institute exhibition \u201cSuperfine: Tailoring Black Style\u201d], I wanted to have some sense of continuity, think about that character, and bring some of that spirit,\u201d the British designer said backstage.<\/p>\n

She has been mentioned several times for creative director jobs at big houses in recent years. Vogue Runway\u2019s Sarah Mower wrote in her review<\/a> of the Wales Bonner SS26 show: \u201cExactly why such demonstrably influential \u2014 and commercially sharp \u2014 women such as Grace Wales Bonner and her elder British counterpart Martine Rose have not yet been hired by a house or a brand is less a mystery than a total disgrace on the industry.\u201d Mower seems to have struck a chord: the comment has been widely re-posted on social media.<\/p>\n

Herm\u00e8s doesn\u2019t have a single creative director \u2014 Pierre-Alexis Dumas is general artistic director, Nad\u00e8ge Vanhee is artistic director of women\u2019s, and Pierre Hardy is in charge of shoes, jewellery, high jewellery and beauty objects. But given the big scale of the business and its track record of delivering growth even in the luxury downturn<\/a>, leading any category at the house is a demanding job in itself. Wales Bonner\u2019s predecessor, Nichanian, transformed menswear and made it a significant business too; Herm\u00e8s\u2019s ready-to-wear and accessories grew 5.5 per cent to \u20ac2.26 billion in the first half of 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This article first appeared on Vogue Business. Grace Wales Bonner is Herm\u00e8s\u2019s new creative director of menswear. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22374,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12919],"tags":[6475,4953,12230,13364,7043],"class_list":["post-22373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-hermes","tag-digital_syndication","tag-hermes","tag-runway","tag-storytypeannouncements","tag-textaboveleftsmall"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22373\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}