Wales Bonner’s AW25 Womenswear Moves at Its Own Tempo

The designer debuts her first standalone womenswear collection, earmarking a defining moment for the brand.

Aviation and attitude: a cropped shearling-collared leather jacket belted at the waist with

Intimacy over excess. Ghertner’s portrait strips away ornamentation.

Contrast and control: a structured black duffle coat with gold fastenings

What does it mean to introduce womenswear now?

A designer’s first standalone womenswear collection is never solely about silhouette or fit; it is a test of coherence, a moment where the codes of a brand are either reinforced or rewritten.

What does it borrow from what came before? What does it discard? What does it propose?

For Autumn/Winter 2025, Wales Bonner offers an answer.

For the first time, her womenswear stands alone: an evolution that has long felt inevitable. This season, the designer refines her offering, extending both its vocabulary and her own, whilst holding true to the principles that have always defined her work.

A portrait of history within a portrait: Theaster Gates’ Black Image Corporation provides the archival photograph, reinforcing Bonner’s ongoing dialogue between fashion and cultural preservation.

The latest collection continues in the brand’s familiar register; balancing British tailoring with diasporic influence, eased structure, and fluid precision. It refines rather than reinvents, distilling what has always been present in her work.

Shot by Zoë Ghertner and styled by Camilla Nickerson, the lookbook resists excess.

 "AW25 is less about direct citation and more an exploration of tone, mood, and movement."

Ghertner, known for her naturalistic lens, captures the collection with an intimacy that strips away artifice. Her images favour texture, focusing on the way fabric sits against skin and how garments move with the body rather than around it. Nickerson, a long standing force in fashion styling, works with the same clarity; framing clothing in a way that feels immediate yet deliberate, eschewing any unnecessary adornment.

The result is an aesthetic that aligns with Bonner’s own ethos: subtle but intentional, conscious of history but never in service to it.

Weaving as history, storytelling, rhythm: the movement of the fringe, blurred by the camera’s lens, recalls the choreography of Harlem’s ballrooms.

Wales Bonner’s menswear has often drawn from the archive, layering scholarly references with an intuitive sense of style. But AW25 is less about direct citation and more an exploration of tone, mood, and movement.

Fringing appears not as embellishment, but as motion itself; recalling the cinematic fluidity of 1920s flappers yet stripped of ornamentation, feeling 'lived-in' rather than performative.

A black tuxedo sits in conversation with the tradition of women wearing tailoring as an act of subversion, evoking the insouciant ease of Bianca Jagger in the 1970s.

And as always, Wales Bonner’s tailoring remains exacting.

Pilgrim loafers, reissued Jewel Mary Janes, and leather boots salute to the 1970s, while visible mending on knitwear draws attention to the labour of hands.

This is a collection attuned to the variability of real wardrobes with clothes designed to be layered, interchanged, and personalised rather than worn as dictated.

he track jacket, redefined. In Wales Bonner’s hands, athleticism and elegance are not opposing.

Fashion, for Wales Bonner, has always been a means of storytelling and this season, that narrative extends once again to the way the brand reserves, reframes, and repositions black cultural aesthetics within the luxury space.

AW25 builds on this lineage in collaboration with The Black Image Corporation, the conceptual project by Theaster Gates dedicated to preserving and recontextualising black visual culture. The collection is in dialogue with this archive, not simply borrowing from history, but placing it in conversation with the present.

The Selah cropped T-shirt features imagery from Moneta Sleet Jr., the first Black photographer to win a Pulitzer Prize and throughout, inspiration is drawn from the editorials of Ebony and Jet magazines.

The past five years have seen increasing fluidity between men’s and women’s collections, with many designers dissolving the boundaries altogether. Tailoring is no longer gendered in the way it once was; the codes of menswear and womenswear now exist in a continuous exchange. And yet, there is still significance in presenting a collection specifically for women.

The move to introduce a womenswear collection at this particular moment is to engage with fashion’s changing structures, whether consciously or not.

Bonner’s dialogue between athleticism and elegance continues: The zip front track jacket, a staple of 1970s leisurewear, is elevated through proportion and restraint.

AW25 does not attempt to define femininity but to expand its parameters, offering clothes that feel instinctive rather than imposed.

Wales Bonner’s decision to debut through a lookbook rather than a runway show speaks to this same sensibility; resisting the urgency of seasonal trends and allowing the collection to exist on its own terms. Her work has never been dictated by the pursuit of the new; instead it moves at its own tempo, drawing from history without being bound by it.

This is not a debut in the traditional sense, but a reaffirmation of the world Wales Bonner has been constructing since 2014. And at a time when British fashion faces uncertainty, the brand stands as an exception: an independent force that has carved out global influence while remaining true to its ethos of refinement, intention, and precision.

AW25 is not a designer taking tentative steps into womenswear, but rather, a designer working from the certainty that the foundation has already been laid.

Writer: Anaïs Lukaku @anaislukaku @newwavemagazine

Photographer: Zoë Ghertner @zoeghertner

Art Director: Jonny Lu @jonnylu

Stylist: Camilla Nickerson

Talent: Selena Forrest @selenaforrest @fordmodels

Casting: Calvin Wilson at @establishmentny

Director of Photography: Chris Llerins @chrisllerins

Makeup: Homa Safar @homasafar

Hair: Dre @dre_on_hair

Set Designer: Jeremy Reimnitz @jeremyreimnitz at @spencervroomanstudio

Prop Assistants: Christian Duff @unitedstatesembassy + Ryan Clough 

Production: Connect The Dots @ctdinc

Exec Producer: Wes Olson @wesolson

Production Manager: Nicole Morra @morra___morra

Production Assistants: Mark Cheche @mark0.3339 Mateo Calvo @matlaflama Soheyl Hamzavi @soheylhamzavi

Thanks to @lindseysteinberg @nevermindagency_ @joevendon @avymarks @artpartner