Singers new Ivy Park label is a fusion of empowerment and pleasure, just as she is
It is a stone-cold fact about the contemporary world that where there are emotional buttons to be pressed, there is a lucrative business possibility. The festive season, for example, is officially ushered in by a fight to the death between retailers over who can construct the general public holler the most with their Christmas ad.
So it says something about how tightly gale we are about women bodies and fitness that even campaigns for running leggings are conceived with that Ive-got-something-in-my-eye thought in head. A commercial for the activewear label Under Armour, entitled I Will What I Want, demonstrates American ballerina Misty Copeland in a dance studio and on stage, soundtracked by the abandonment letters she received at the beginning of her job; it has clocked up 10 m views on YouTube. The Adidas All In For #mygirls campaign, the Nike Better for It places and Always award-winning #LikeAGirl campaign have all made the same emotional sweetspot of physical health and female empowerment. Fourth-wave feminism is on a workout high, all there is uneasy about how much girl self-esteem is bound up with our bodies.
Enter stage left: Beyonc. Now, when Queen Bey engages with such issues, it becomes a talking point. When she lit up the word feminist as the backdrop for her performance at the 2014 MTV awardings, she brought the discussion about what feminism means and what it looks like back into the mainstream. When she plummeted her Formation video the nighttime before her half-time performance at this years Superbowl, she put the Black Lives Matter movement at the heart of American popular culture.( Gloria Steinem described Formation as profound, merging and healing. Former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani slammed Beyoncs performance as outrageous for a slot that is talking to centre America. The point is , nobody talked about anything else for three days .)
Beyonc is launching Ivy Park, a way sportswear line produced in partnership with Topshop boss Philip Green. It is a label that capitalises on two possibilities. First, the explosion in athleisure.( This week, Selfridges opened the Body Studio, 37,000 sq ft of lingerie, loungewear, sleepwear and activewear, inducing it the London storages largest department .) And second, the power Beyonc wields over 21 st-century womanhood. To grasp the ambitious scope of patrons Ivy Park aims to reach, appear no further than the eclectic span of UK stockists: Topshop, Selfridges, Net-a-Porter and JD Sports.
The photographs of Beyonc wearing Ivy Park, seen here for the first time, are strikingly differences between tint from the fitness photos that inundated Instagram. There are no serene yoga bunnies with their eyes shut: instead, we have Beyonc on a basketball hoop, comprised aloft like a queen, gazing out from under a hoodie. Instead of poses designed to flatter ethereal, reed-slender limbs, Beyonc holds herself horizontal in gymnasts hoops, in a way that emphasises the strength of her thighs. The air of stillness, of moodiness, is closer to a Rocky boxing gym than the perky, Jane Fonda heritage of womens fitness.
Beyonc has constructed discipline, hard work and a ferocious attitude central to what she stands for: in her lyrics, her videos, in her trademark on-stage posture( legs planted apart, microphone clenched in one hand ). In a launch video for Ivy Park, she works out with battle ropes, a heavy piece of modish-for-2 016 gym equipment that is as exhausting as it audios. In a voiceover, she talks about early-morning running about not was intended to get out of couch, but doing it anyway. Where 20 th-century schoolboys had the poem Invictus( I am the master of my fate/ I am the captain of my being ), the 21 st-century lady has Beyoncs Flawless.
There is also a lot of way in the Ivy Park message. The hoop portrait is surely a nod to Helmut Newtons portrait of Daryl Hannah, taken for Vanity Fair in 1984. In that hit, Hannah is suspended from metal resounds, with the urban scenery of Los Angeles as her backdrop; its a including references to her role as a mermaid in Splash, and as a goddess in Hollywood. She wears a leotard, and her mane hangs in blond, beachy waves details that are echoed in Beyoncs photo.
The link is important because, while much of the new range is straightforward running leggings, sweatshirts, mesh T-shirts Ivy Park also aims to deliver high-end way at mass-market price. Beyonc worked on the label with longtime collaborator Karen Langley, a British stylist who has created several video and performance looks for her. As a former Dazed& Confused way administrator, Langleys moodboard appeared beyond generic ponytailed blondes. This is performance-quality sportswear, but it is important that it looks like way, Langley tells me. Beyonc, she says, have engaged in every detail of the design, and is our most dedicated tester. She really cares about whether it works.
Ivy is Beyoncs daughters middle name; Park a including references to Parkwood Entertainment, the name of her management corporation. Of course, its also a including references to outdoor space. Where most aspirational ad campaigns are killed in envy-inducing puts guess natural sun streaming through high windows on to perfectly aligned bamboo mats Ivy Park roots itself in an ordinary-looking public park with a gym and a basketball hoop. It is urban and aesthetically pleasing in a classic, gritty kind of route. Beyonc operates at several different levels, Langley explains. You have the Beyhive the fans who seem a very personal linkage with her. But you also have an intellectual conversation going on about what shes doing in our culture. You have a whole lot of people who wouldnt inevitably recognize as fans, but who are interested in her on that level.
Beyonc herself, Im sorry to say, was not available to talk to the Guardian. She rarely are talking about writers, procuring the cover of last Septembers American Vogue without making an interview an almost unprecedented power move. For the launch of Ivy Park, she has given one interview, which will run in 45 international problems of Elle. Nonetheless, she did give me one quote: True charm is in the health of our intellects, hearts and bodies. I know that when I seem physically strong, I am mentally strong, and I wanted to create a brand that constructed other women seem the same way. Beyonc keeps us at limbs length while talking apparently from the heart.
This element of mystery is essential because, like all great brands, Beyonc is ultimately selling us what fund cant buy. Like Jimmy Choo or Coca-Cola, she says something about how we want to live, who we want to be particularly obliging in the athleisure marketplace, where we buy material items( yoga mats, vests) as a substitute for the emotional dimensions we really want( inner peace, physical dignity ). The Beyonc brand is a fusion of empowerment and enjoyment.
Her power comes from the fact that other women enjoy her charm unlike that of other women. Her physical shape with that gravity-defying bottom and tiny waist may be as unattainable as that of Gisele Bndchen, yet it is less alienating. While most supermodels and movie stars fall into a narrow parameters of charm and glamour, Beyonc looks like nobody is. And by looking individual, she gives other women granted permission to do the same.
Beyoncs body is iconic you can recognise her merely from her silhouette, says Langley( who, for the record, surfs and does yoga, CrossFit and trapeze, the last of which I do specifically for the challenge to go out and scare myself ). Shes astounding to dress because shes not a clothes horse. She gives clothes life.
Its no accident that these images were photographed in black-and-white. We wanted to establish ourselves as iconic from the get-go; the black-and-white imagery is a nice signifier of that, Langley says. It makes it feel like were not fresh out of the tin. It also invites onlookers to look for a deeper message it feels more classic, and less disposable than colour. After all, everything is a metaphor when it comes to images of women working out. Operating stands for freedom, sweat for attempt, abs for achievement. The park Beyonc discusses in that launch video is both a physical place and an internal one: a place to draw on when you need to delve deep.( When I had to give birth, I went to my park, she says .)
When Beyonc talks about fitness, she scarcely mentions the route she appears. In images such as these, she shows us her body; what she sells, meanwhile, is that canny, beautiful mind.
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