Beyoncé doesn’t dress to set trends

Beyoncé‘s Renaissance tour finally beamed into the United States this week, with a show on Wednesday night in Philadelphia that gives her American audience a taste of the visuals they have been craving from her 2022 house-inspired album.

The wardrobe she has worn throughout the tour’s European leg has been futuristic, flashy and camp – a seemingly never-ending progression of red and silver outfits designed to gleam and dazzle under stage lighting and between robotic frame-like arms with mirrored surfaces, drapes of sequins and rhinestones and bodysuit and leotard silhouettes. They are armor for a war of ballroom death drops and stiletto stomps (with her army of dancers, including voguing stars like Honey Balenciaga, behind her). And they are undisputedly costumes, not fashion, though household names such as Gucci and Fendi, and emerging talents such as LaQuan Smith and Brandon Blackwood, have created them.

Working with stylists including KJ Moody, Shiona Turini, Karen Langley and Julia Sarr-Jamois, she has worn designers who hail from the country in which she is performing – Dutch couturier Iris Van Herpen in Amsterdam, Marseille-born Simon Porte Jacquemus for a stop in that city – and on Juneteenth, wore exclusively black designers, including Ferragamo by Maximilian Davis and Off-White by Ibrahim Kamara.

They have reinforced the sense that Beyoncé is a maximalist dresser and the consummate performer. “When I think of Beyoncé’s fashion, I tend to think of her onstage,” says Michael Arcenaux, who wrote about his devotion to the singer in his 2018 memoir, I Can’t Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I’ve Put My Faith in Beyoncé. “That’s when she looks her best,” Arcenaux says.

But unlike most worldwide superstars of her generation, Beyoncé does not dress to set trends. Her fans have flocked to her shows wearing looks made in homage to her onstage ensembles – many arrive in replicas of her Loewe handprint bodysuit, and one video purports to show the performer complimenting an attendee’s look from the stage. Yet somehow, a controversy continues to brew in the Beyhive: that she is not a “fashion girl”. That she dresses to the nines but doesn’t get the credit. Or, most unforgiving, that she just isn’t stylish.

But Beyoncé‘s fashion sense is what makes her one of the world’s most defiant celebrity dressers.

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In today’s symbiosis of fashion and celebrity, a musician or actor is told – usually by a powerful stylist working in conjunction with a brand’s savvy public relations or VIP head – to court fashion designers like kings. The goal is to be the vessel for the designer, or the interpreter of their vision.

Stars like Harry Styles and the Haim sisters have made wearing recognisable runway hits a cornerstone of their image; if you can wear the right piece from the right collection, it demonstrates your fluency with the rarefied world of fashion and your credibility as a cultural soothsayer. These kinds of arrangements, such as Styles’s longtime association with Gucci, can also buttress a pop star’s earnings, which are ever shrinking in the streaming age.