Erykah Badu has long made her ethereal personal style and signature sound—an enthralling blend of hip-hop, soul, jazz, and funk—her calling card. Now, the fashion world is finally catching up to her.
Erykah Badu likes to wear clothes that make music when she walks—it’s why today she has strings of bells strapped to her ankles. She also has a tangle of amethyst crystal pendants thrown over her paint-splattered overalls, gigantic silver rings on each finger, rubber bangles stacked up to her elbows, and a red beanie pulled over her hair.
Today the place is relatively quiet—her younger brother, Eevin, and younger sister, Koryan, have yet to arrive—and Queenie is holding court. “My mother was the historian, she kept every article,” Queenie tells me, referring to her mother, Thelma, who passed away in 2020 at the age of 93. “Every day she would cut out clippings and paste them into different frames.
“One thing I brag about all the time is that my sister is probably the only artist I know who easily sells out arenas despite not having put out an album in almost a decade,” says sibling Koryan, or Koko for short. “And to me this moment feels like her re-blossoming.” Koko once sang backup for Badu’s band but these days acts as her sister’s right hand. “Her left handright hand,” says Queenie, cackling.
Inside, it’s a veritable Aladdin’s cave of tchotchkes and objets d’art, with Buddha statues lining the staircase, African masks hanging on the walls, and Indian marigold garlands strung in the windows. Badu greets me at the door in a dramatic silk Libertine caftan printed with amusing pictures of monkeys in space suits and leads me past her recording studio to the living area, where two larger-than-life Malian brass busts have glowing sticks of incense sprouting from their heads.
Marni’s creative director Francesco Risso found himself mesmerized by her process as he put the finishing touches on the capsule collection made in partnership with the singer. “I’ve worked with celebrities in the past, and there are times that you struggle with them because it’s so much about the body, or how it looks in a picture. With Erykah, it’s a completely new world,” says Risso, recalling the moment he found her in a hotel room in London experimenting with the first samples.
Badu’s 2023 to-do list is seemingly endless and written in all caps on a board that hangs in the kitchen, lest she forgets—this month, for example, she’s dropping a collection of smoking accessories and her own blend of marijuana. Tonight, her thoughts are preoccupied with creative labor of a different kind: R&B singer Summer Walker is pregnant with twins, due any day now, and Badu will serve as the 26-year-old’s doula.
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