All through her profession, Erykah Badu has persistently impressed conversations round her future-forward ‘matches. Her newest transfer on the 2025 Billboard Ladies in Music Awards was no exception. Badu took the stage to simply accept the ICON Award on March 29 in a voluptuous customized mohair “booty go well with” that had people clapping again louder than her knitted bottom.
Many assumed the look—crafted in collaboration with 22-year-old designer Myah Hasbany—was a callout of Brazilian Butt Raise (BBL) tradition or a dig at “pretend” our bodies.
Nonetheless, others acknowledged a deeper nod.
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Make-up artist Shèreen Greene shared a collage linking Badu’s look to Venus collectible figurines courting again to 35,000 BCE, alongside pictures of Sarah Baartman, identified traditionally because the “Hottentot Venus.”
Paired collectively, the pictures remind us how society–notably by non-Black lenses—has lengthy gazed at, distorted, and tried to decrease the feminine kind, particularly when that kind is full, Black, and highly effective.
Badu confirmed her tribute to the “full determine kind” in a brief movie.
The go well with’s exaggerated bust and hips weren’t mocking—they had been reclaiming. It was a nod to lineage that features the hypervisibility and exploitation of Black girls’s our bodies whereas additionally refusing to be lowered to that historical past. It requested the viewer to sit down with their assumptions, not hers.
Hasbany, who has been working with Badu since 2020 and has already earned renown for her designs with highlighting physique and gender dysmorphia, described the piece as open to interpretation.
We noticed it as a love letter to the pure varieties, curves, and legacy of Black girls’s our bodies—exterior of caricature, exterior of efficiency, and with out the necessity for clarification.
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And possibly that’s the purpose. It doesn’t have to be one factor. It doesn’t must make sense to everybody. It was artwork, it was protest, and most significantly, it was ours.
