Where Did That Designer Get That Idea? (New York Times)
The designer Grace Wales Bonner at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London, where her exhibition "A Time for New Dreams" is on display. Credit Andrew Testa for The New York Times
LONDON — A few weeks before her London Fashion Week show, scheduled for Sunday, the prizewinning fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner was wandering around a show of a different kind at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery here.
Titled “A Time for New Dreams,” it was full of photographs, sculpture, sound, film and even a shrine-like meditation space, and had been curated by Ms. Wales Bonner and the gallery staff, conceived as a kind of backdrop to her coming fall collection show.
Understand the one, she suggested, and you would have a better understanding of the other. For anyone trying to answer the perennial question of “where in the world did that designer come up with that idea?” the exhibition is effectively a primer on a fashion creative process.
“It’s important that there is no hierarchy between practices,” said the 28-year-old, who was wearing a Céline skirt (old Céline) and a shirt of her own design as she walked through the space, explaining how the exhibits by, or about, her literary and artistic heroes inspired her work.