Beyonce announces collaboration with Balmain

Days after rumors began to swirl regarding her break with Adidas, Beyonce returns to the fashion fold with a collaboration. Designer Olivier Rousteing says he has been hard at work since the album’s release, “I was sketching and sketching as I listened, and sometimes you can’t control the emotion of your sketch. And 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,” he tells VOGUE, “I contacted Marni [Senofonte, Beyoncé’s stylist ] and B. And I said, ‘honestly, I want to create a couture collection with you.’ And they were like: ‘Wow, that’s a big surprise.’”

Beyonce announced the collab Friday via Instagram and the rest is history, “This appears to be the first time that a Black woman has overseen the couture offering from an historic Parisian house. And those designs were created in partnership with the first Black man to ever oversee all the collections at an historic Parisian house. Let’s hope those two firsts help inspire plenty of others…Thank you, Beyoncé.”