When you appear on the cover of Vogue’s coveted September issue, it’s going to come with a lot of critiques. And it doesn’t even matter if you’re Beyoncé. But if you’re going to critique the Queen Bee—and, of all things, a black woman’s hair—you better be prepared for the backlash.
Enter Megan Garber.
Garber wrote a lengthy piece for The Atlantic about Beyoncé’s Vogue cover. Mind you, Vogue has only had three black women grace its September covers, and the fact that Garber could only point out that Beyoncé’s hair was stringy is a major fail.
“Bey and Vogue are not necessarily recommending that the Normals of the world start rocking stringy hair[. …] They’re making a political statement disguised as an aesthetic one,” Garber wrote. “Here is Beyoncé, whose brand is strong enough to withstand being photographed with stringy hair, suggesting that, for the rest of us, the best hairdos might be the ones that don’t require all the doing.”
Garber refers to Beyonce’s hair as “unpretty,” hair that may not even be her own. But that’s beside the point.
First of all, one has to wonder if Garber has ever seen any cover besides this one. There have been tons of women with the wet-look hair on Vogue. And not just Vogue. There’s nothing revolutionary about the hair, but if you want to start a revolution, be a white woman commenting about a black woman’s “unpretty” hair. And that’s exactly what Garber started on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/fleur_de_lis89/status/631943042753126400https://twitter.com/femmeminem/status/631945190446637057https://twitter.com/JennMJack/status/631941504525668352https://twitter.com/geejayeff/status/631938848424001536https://twitter.com/ronkelawal/status/631929418341056513
Of all things to nitpick from Beyoncé’s cover. Too bad she didn’t actually wait for the cover article so she could pick something more worthwhile to write her ridiculous “think piece” about.