A Magazine Curated By Grace Wales Bonner

Since her debut collection Ebonics for AW2015 until the most recent collection Volta Jazz for SS2022, Grace has imbued her designs with cultural narratives that explore the mythologies of Blackness across our planet. Her collections for Wales Bonner, and the performative nature of their presentations, capture a multitude of identities and expressions of beauty. Her aesthetic stands at the forefront of fashion as a quest to align sartorial craft with the insouciant gestures of the street. Entitled Rhapsody In The Street, A#22 is an academic and visual survey of Grace’s research across 200 pages. Responding to the tradition of Black poetry, literature and portrait photography of the 20th century, the issue features a curation of archival portfolios and other historical ephemera, as well as newly commissioned essays, poems, paintings and portraits. As an object, the issue is treated with reverence, combining matte and gloss paper stocks with gilded pages. New work includes visual portfolios photographed in Los Angeles, London, Miami, Paris and New York, with the leitmotif of Black portraiture central to each. A self-portrait by Ming Smith joins Steven Traylor’s cinematic capture of the musician Damian Marley, Zoë Ghertner’s intimate depiction of model Selena Forrest, Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s studio works, and a triumphant study of Wales Bonner’s SS2017 collection Ezekiel by Tyler Mitchell.