Solange Quietly Calls Out Magazine for Purposefully Photoshopping Her Hair
Even though she wrote a whole song called "Don't Touch My Hair," Solange still had to deal with a magazine retouching her hair in a cover photo.
Solange Knowles wrote a whole song about the cultural and personal significance of hair to African-American women titled “Don’t Touch My Hair” on her (excellent) album, A Seat at the Table. It’s a relatively straightforward and simple request, one a magazine that takes the time to orchestrate an entire feature on the Grammy-award winning artist should be able to honor. But the Evening Standard Magazine managed to screw that simple (and culturally powerful) request up.
Solange was on the cover of the Evening Standard, looking gorgeous and sporting a unique hairstyle. Her bleached blonde hair was braided to create a large halo-like crown above her head. But the only reason we know that’s how her hair was styled is because she posted the original photo to her Instagram.
The cover of the magazine, however, looked like this:
As you can see, the magazine Photoshopped the crown out. Clearly, Solange was feeling some type of way about it, because she captioned her own photo of the original hairstyle “dtmh,” a nod to her song, “Don’t Touch My Hair.”
If you’re still trying to give the magazine the benefit of the doubt—hey, maybe the art department lives under a rock and has never heard of Solange, right…?—well, don’t. When the magazine retouched the artist’s hair, they were explicitly erasing both Solange’s cultural identity. After all, this is literally an excerpt from the accompanying interview:
Not only that, but the specific hairstyle had personal significance to Solange. The crown is meant to symbolize Orion, which "inspired the name of her latest performance series, Orion’s Rise, and it is even tattooed on her inner right arm,” according to HuffPost.
“I had some revelations, in terms of my parents finding out they conceived me in Egypt after visiting the Giza pyramids, and connecting to that and the constellation of Orion that aligns with Giza,” Solange told the Evening Standard.
If this entire story isn’t sounding like a huge mess just yet, that’s only because you haven’t heard the final detail. Angelica Jade Bastien, one of the writers of the piece, was so offended with the way the magazine handled the entire feature that she publicly disowned the work and requested that her byline be removed. She explained why in a long Twitter thread.
