EXCLUSIVE: Beyoncé Wants to Change the Conversation
These days, the superstar-turned-supermogul is slaying—pop charts, music-industry standards, societal labels, and now, the athleticwear biz—all on her own.
This article originally appears in the May 2016 issue of ELLE, available digitally on April 5, on newsstands in select cities starting April 6, and nationwide on April 19.
In this worldwide ELLE exclusive, Beyoncé gives a rare in-depth interview, in which she speaks candidly about how the first Destiny’s Child album helped her discover she had real power, why she approached Topshop to be her 50-50 partner in Ivy Park, the true meaning of feminism, what she wants to accomplish next, her “Formation” message, and much more.
Here, the full interview.
January 23 was a normal day for Beyoncé. On the docket:
1. Showcase new athleisure line, Ivy Park 2. Plot launch of new music label
3. Prepare to dominate Super Bowl 50
4. Polish off top secret “Formation” video
5. Gear up for all-stadium world tour
When “Run the world” is your business plan, your day starts early.
At exactly 5 a.m., Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter arrives at Mimoda, a spare, mirror-walled, bare-floored dance studio in central Los Angeles that echoes the image she is here to disseminate: that of an athlete, suited up in a white jersey with a white mesh jacket, stripped of accessories and even shoes, hair teased into a corona of Flashdance curls. A woman who is here to work. Surrounded by a trio of dancers who’ve been backing her up for years, she rehearses, for the benefit of the camera, a slo-mo version of dance sequences that we later learn are part of “Formation.” In other shots, she stands alone, still and commanding, staring straight into the camera—without so much as an accidental blink. The atmosphere is relaxed, upbeat, as she and the dancers joke and laugh. But make no mistake: This is a tightly managed operation.
It’s an operation run, down to the last detail, by a superstar-in-chief worth, according to Forbes, an estimated $250 million as of 2015. Among the operation’s latest developments: Through a new music- label arm of her eight-year-old company, Parkwood Entertainment, Beyoncé will soon be delivering to the world a cadre of young artists whose sound and image she has personally groomed and fostered. (Get your first peek at them on page 260.) And then there’s Ivy Park— not just another flash-in-the-pan celebrity collab, but rather a joint venture with Topshop that was years in the making, because when Beyoncé signs on, she gets her hands dirty: She shapes each project, she runs it, and, yes, she owns—or at least co-owns—it. And she expects its impact to extend beyond the fiscal. As far as its founder is concerned, Ivy Park isn’t just a bunch of logo sweats, basketball-mesh ops, sheer-paneled bodysuits, and hyper-refined leggings; it’s a way to push a feel-good, woman-power ethos, to de-emphasize perfectionism, to value strength over beauty, and to inspire, according to the company, “women to work with, not against, their bodies.” (BeyHive trivia alert: The singer’s lucky number 4—the date of her birthday, Jay Z’s birthday, and their wedding anniversary—appears subtly throughout; the name Ivy, too—shared, of course, by her four-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy—is inspired by the Roman numeral IV.) Beyoncé’s measure of Ivy Park’s success: “For me,” she says, “it won’t be real until I see women at the gym, in the park, on the street wearing the collection, sweating in it, and loving it.”
That the myth surrounding Beyoncé’s identity, and her music, swells with each chapter of her career is due in large part to sheer prowess: She’s the most-nominated woman in Grammy history, with 20 awards and 53 nominations. She has sold over 120 million solo albums. As she puts it herself in “Formation,” “Sometimes I go off, I go hard / Get what’s mine, I’m a star / ‘Cause I slay.”
But the myth-building is also due, in part, to her relative silence. Yale professor Daphne A. Brooks noted in the New York Times last year, “She’s been able to reach this level of stardom in which she’s managed…hyper-visibility and inaccessibility simultaneously.” For three years, the singer has been all but mum in the press, letting the work speak for itself—cultivating a sense of mystery and, in this all-access era, an exotic remove that is itself a show of power—while scattering pixie- dust intimacies via (mostly captionless) pictures on Instagram.
So the fact that, two weeks after our shoot, she unleashed “Formation” without a whisper of promotion, was, of course, no surprise at all. That’s just how Beyoncé rolls. Anyway, who needs prerelease buzz when you can rack up 7 million YouTube views in 24 hours without it? With arresting imagery—the singer sprawled atop a sinking New Orleans police car; a black young man—a child, really— dancing before a line of white police officers in riot gear; Blue Ivy swaying sweetly to the lyric “I like my baby hair, with baby hair and Afros / I like my Negro nose with Jackson 5 nostrils"—the video instantly became part of ongoing public discourse about race and criminal-justice reform in America. While some police accused her of baiting them, others, like the Tampa police department, have been taking to Twitter to defend her ("What?! @TampaPD officers have been in #formation for days signing up to keep the #Beehive [sic] safe! #Truth #Fact”). As with most things Beyoncé does—change her hair, write a love song to her husband—there wasn’t anybody without a point of view on what Beyoncé should or shouldn’t do.
With “Formation,” Beyoncé declared herself an artist willing to use her power to provoke difficult but necessary conversations about the most fraught topics in American life. In other words, she’s not just going to keep wearing her crown, she’s going to keep earning it—"I dream it, I work hard, I grind till I own it"—every step of the way. Here, she talks about what people don’t understand about her work, and why even designing a line of leggings can be a feminist act.
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