It’s almost beginning to feel as if the history of ’60s and early ’70s counterculture is replaying itself before our eyes. Since the election of Trump in 2016, the radical impulses of angry “wokeness” have started to metabolize, among some, into a search for inner peace and spiritual enlightenment. The evidence is all there with young fashion designers, the fast-response creative vocalizers of zeitgeist-y collective think. In the past week, Craig Green, Cottweiler, and Charles Jeffrey all spoke, variously, about the search for states of transcendence, and now comes the conversation with Grace Wales Bonner. She has called her collection Ecstatic Recital, and has gone yet deeper, right back to sources that any hippie who lived through the events of ’67–’71 might find incredibly familiar.
“It’s about entering this kind of eastern mysticism through sound,” she said, quietly placing a book, published in 1971, Be Here Now, on the desk in front of her. “It’s by Ram Dass, one of the first people who brought ideas of yoga and meditation to a Western audience. It’s one of the first books which introduced the idea of finding a spiritual path.” Ram Dass had an early association with Timothy Leary (which he subsequently repudiated). It was the tune in, turn on, drop out era. Now the Hanuman Foundation holds the rights to Ram Dass’s works. “And they very kindly gave me permission to work with some of their archive.” Inspirational texts from the book appear printed on polo shirts and cotton pieces. One reads: “The stillness. The calmness. The fulfillment. When you make love and experience the ecstasy of unity.” Wales Bonner says some of the proceeds will go back to the foundation.
Indian-influenced mystical practices might seem a surprising departure for a young woman who has spent her career thus far leading the awareness around black identity, but Wales Bonner found her way into this new phase through the same portal. “I accessed India through African-American artists,” she said, explaining how prayer chimes came to be suspended on the button hole of a cream tailored jacket, and why she’s used patch-worked brocades from India (recycled from scraps) as apron wraps. She started on this path while listening to the “devotional music” of Alice Coltrane, the African-American jazz musician who went on to set up her own ashram in California in the ’80s, and by studying the late African-American sculptor Terry Adkins, whose body of work involved creating fantastical musical instruments. “He was kind of a shaman, I’d say.” There are prints of Adkins’s images on cotton patches that appear on a blue-and-white-striped shirt. She likes the idea of “someone who wears their history.”
Wales Bonner is a practitioner of that which she preaches—she spent time on a retreat in India recently—although she’d certainly disagree with the preachy turn of phrase. “I’m transparent about the meaning of what I do, but it’s not prescriptive,” she considers. In the end, it’s a more relaxed collection, mixing in nylon yoga pants with cargo pockets, and jersey pieces with her more familiar signature tailoring and some of the elaborate embroideries she’s known for.
I read BE HERE NOW many, many years ago and it was a favorite book of a dear friend of mine who passed away 2 weeks ago now, so this is especially poignant. She was an avid reader of this blog and she would have seen this Wales Bonner collection and just loved it...ma cher Odette, si vous pouvez le voir, faites le moi savoir. Je t'ai aimé, je t'aime, je t'aimerai toujours.
http://walesbonner.net/
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