AS THE finale to her trilogy exploring the intersections of Britain and the Caribbean, Wales Bonner presents The Light of Black Sunlight, a collection that fuses “classicism with an Afro-Atlantic sensibility”.
Hers is a brand founded with the intention of breaking down ideas of exclusionary eurocentrism surrounding luxury fashion; through this collection she continues to expand this blinkered perspective.
The collection was presented through a film, The Light of Black Sunlight, alongside a bibliography of writings by Nobel Prize-winning St Lucian poet Derek Walcott, and poet and academic Kamau Brathwaite. Braithwaite, having studied at Harrison College in Barbados, attended Cambridge University.
The AW21 pieces are a tribute to Britain’s black scholars in the 1980s, who travelled to the UK to attend British universities. The film, made by Jeano Edwards, is beautiful and delicate; figures walk across the coast in Port Antonio, Kingston in Jamaica and Goodenough college in London, clutching copies of Walcott’s work.
These shots are overlaid with piano by Laraaji, and Briathwaite’s words. It is a meditative homage to the scholars from which Wales Bonner drew inspiration.
Wales Bonner worked with Savile Row tailors Anderson & Sheppard to create her tuxedos, and collaborated with Adidas Originals to produce retro-inspired, and characteristically crafted sportswear.
The collection is made up of overcoats and sweater vests, ‘70s collars, collegiate stripes and shearling trim, with pieces occasionally adorned with prints by Joy Gregory that muse on Jamaican “flowers of resistance”.
Through this reimagining of whitewashed academia and tailoring, “Black Sunlight illuminates a world of Caribbean Thought and Black British intellectualism”.
By Connie de Pelet