You lose some — and, as is ever the case with Beyoncé, you win some.
On Thursday, news broke that the 32-time Grammy-winning singer was departing her partnership with Adidas and taking Ivy Park with her, amid claims of creative differences and low sales. As previously reported by theGrio, the brand had been struggling in recent years, falling severely short of Adidas’ projections. But despite the lagging sales, sources say the dissolution of the five-year partnership doesn’t necessarily mean the end of Ivy Park.
On Friday, however, Beyoncé was announced as Vogue France’s April cover star, where she debuted a new couture collaboration with legacy French luxury brand Balmain, based on her seventh studio album, “Renaissance.”
The cover, featuring a black and white image of Beyoncé standing stoically dressed in one of the new designs, a crystal-encrusted black velvet longsleeved and hooded gown with a matching hat, is staggering. The other pieces from the collection readers get to preview in the cover story are equally commanding, with a campy futuristic style harkening back to the overexaggerated haute couture of the early 2000s.
Each piece in the line was inspired by a song or lyric from the album, Balmain Creative Director Olivier Rousteing told Vogue. He said he was inspired to create the collection while sketching and listening to “Renaissance” one afternoon during the summer of 2022.
“I started to imagine the sketches inside her album, how they would relate to the songs and the lyrics—it wasn’t something I was supposed to be doing, but I was just inspired by the music to do it. And that’s how this started,” Rousteing said.
Not long after, Rousteing called up Beyoncé, for whom he designed the looks for her history-making Coachella appearance in 2018, and pitched the idea of co-designing a collection based on her album. The call, which reportedly…
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