Research Is the Work: A Grace Wales Bonner–Style 1,000→100 Drill
Popular Studio Lesson 3: Research like a creative director, not a content goblin
I’ve admired Grace Wales Bonner’s work for a long while now. This week I read an interview with her about the research techniques she uses to form ideas for new collections. As a lover of process, research, and image gathering myself, I’m excited to share a few exercises to help you hone your own skills à la GWB.
Grace Wales Bonner is a London‑born fashion designer and researcher whose work sits right on the seam between fashion, art, and scholarship. (pun intended) She launched her label, Wales Bonner, in 2014 after graduating from Central Saint Martins, and quickly became a baddie in the fashion world — winning the LVMH Young Designer Prize and the British Fashion Award for Emerging Menswear within a couple of years.
Her clothes blend precise tailoring with deep cultural research, especially around Black Atlantic histories, music, and spirituality. Research, reading, image‑gathering, sound, and collaboration—is the backbone of everything she makes. And everything I love. She’s now the creative director of menswear at Hermès.
Popular Studio Lesson 3 presents: treating research as the work itself. A masterpiece in its own right.
How Grace Wales Bonner actually works
For Wales Bonner, research is the practice, research is the work.
She starts with a point of reference a musician, a spiritual movement, a slice of history—as a way to explore an idea or understand an environment, then surrounds it with images, sound, and literature. She’s building a collection of perspectives so the thing can’t collapse into a single, neat narrative.
She’ll have a central research point and then bring in collaborators to think on it with her, letting their readings of the material challenge and expand her own. Collaboration means she doesn’t have to have all the answers; the project becomes a proposition people gather around instead of a closed statement.
Underneath all of that is editing: she might end up with a core of 100 images, but she’s looked at thousands to get there. That sifting, archiving, and recombining is part of the art. The dream.
I love that she puts an actual number on it and that her practice is essentially deep, sustained image diving. Of course, I need to know more about the exact how and where of her research, but maybe we’ll get that someday. Popular interview with Grace Wales Bonner?
