Announced today, Hermès’ appointment of Grace Wales Bonner as Creative Director of Menswear marks the recognition of a designer who has long deserved the chance to lead a maison. As the first Black female creative director of a major fashion house, her role is both a significant milestone and a welcome breath of fresh air…
Talk of the end of streetwear has fuelled fashion discourse in recent years – but someone forgot to tell the kids that stand in line outside Soho stores in London for brands like Palace, Supreme and Stussy on every single “drop day”. It’s this culture – its good and its bad – that is the focus…
The first time I spoke to Rohan Mirza, the twenty-three-year-old had just debuted his first collection and was still sifting through constant social media tags raving about his nude illusion shirt with raised skin on the back, signifying sports jersey branded directly onto the skin – or skin shirt, made completely of silicone. Simultaneously touching…
Trainers were once something bound to their activity – be it running, basketball or tennis. But, 40-odd years on from their first connections to style through hip hop culture, that feels like very old news. These shoes can now signify everything from their wearer’s cultural cache (a pair of Wales Bonner Adidas), to their knowledge…
A true maverick, Chinese-American fashion designer Kaisik Wong was born in San Francisco in 1950. Emerging onto the Bay Area’s counterculture scene in the late 1960s, his work not only rejected existing structures of the fashion industry but defied classification altogether, sitting somewhere between art, theatre, and garment-making. His pieces straddle time and place: equal…
“Sooraj has a uniform,” said the stylist Disha Pai, reflecting on styling the rapper Hanumankind, or Sooraj Cherukat, on some of his earliest projects. “It’s a baniyan and a pant.” Not much has changed since then, considering that’s exactly how the Bangalore-based rapper skrrted onto our screens last year in Big Dawgs. While his white…
In some ways, showing how rich you are with what you wear is the same as it ever was. See ridiculously priced items that goad the plebs made by The Row, or a Birkin owned by the actual Jane Birkin selling for an eye watering $8.6m at auction. But each turn of the news cycle brings…
My Beautiful Laundrette, the Stephen Frears directed, Harif Kareshi-scripted film, came out in 1985. The film is – rightly – remembered as a boundary-pushing queer multi-racial love story, with the breakout star of Daniel Day-Lewis. But, with it back in cinemas for the fortieth anniversary this month, it’s a time to look again, and look…