Grace Wales Bonner is the new menswear creative director at Hermès Maybe the best fashion news this year

Hermès has always been a conservative brand that knows when to bet on brilliant but unconventional creatives. There have been Gaultier and Margiela in the past decades and, today, a surprise name: Grace Wales Bonner. Needless to say, it is a more than welcome surprise. Wales Bonner has been for years one of the most loved and appreciated designers on the scene, she has been the protagonist of high-profile collaborations and over the years she has managed to create and evolve an incredibly personal language. Her creative direction promises great things for Hermès, perhaps the most solid brand in the world, but also for her own line, which will surely now enjoy much higher budgets and visibility, a bit like what happened in the 90s to the lines of McQueen and Galliano when the founders arrived at Givenchy and Dior respectively.

The appointment of Grace Wales Bonner, moreover, carries a very important weight since it finally places in a position of great influence a female and BIPOC designer, breaking that now ubiquitous convention in the industry that wants gay and white men at the helm of everything. A convention that, among the recent appointments of Meryl Rogge, Louise Trotter, Sarah Burton, Rachel Scott and Maria Grazia Chiuri, has made it clear that the music has indeed (and finally) changed. In fact, this month, the entire industry press complained about several designs seen on the runway seen as vaguely misogynistic between constrictions and hidden faces. The direction of Hermès is a very interesting position because the brand is substantially the healthiest in the current market, remains independent but whose status is not based exclusively on the commercial success of ready-to-wear, which leaves Wales Bonner completely free to experiment and propose new languages starting from the excellent (but neutral) base left to her by Veronique Nichanian.