October 19, 2023 |
“When I touch something, it turns to gold,” Karen Binns says with conviction. She’s very matter-of-fact when she speaks, musing over her honest and unadulterated career as a stylist with the kind of exactitude you might expect from a rapper.
The original NYC B-girl and Eighties club kid, Binns, 62, is caught up in the maelstrom of a full-throttle career renaissance right now, styling megastars like Naomi Campbell for mag covers, robing catwalks and jetting around the world with Wizkid.
It’s a scorching mid-June afternoon the first time we chat on the phone, with Binns managing to find only a moment away amid her booked and busy schedule. Hiding her eyes behind smoky sunglasses as she mellows out for a hot 30 minutes in the midst of men’s fashion week, she states, “I tell the truth. I don’t lie. I don’t play the games that everybody plays. I don’t try to be someone I am not. I keep it 100.” She’s sitting at a chic Parisian café with its tables and chairs spilling out on to the street when she tells me, “I don’t do airhead ideas, either. I don’t have that privilege. That doesn’t relate to me. I relate to hard work, consistency, excitement and love.” A certain rigour is imbued in every sentence she utters. Inside her erudite mind, fantasy flourishes.
Binns is a secular saint of styling, a creative director and consultant, a true tastemaker of our times with more than 30 years of experience, whose indelible genius has seeped into every atom of the industry. With an almost never-ending number of oh-so-familiar credits under her diamanté belt – the video for Estelle’s American Boy and Andre Walker’s Paris shows, to name a couple – the fact is, she’s still got it. “I wouldn’t still be doing this if I didn’t make hits,” she says.
At the forefront of the Afrobeats movement (and just about every other cultural crusade in her lifetime), Binns’ work with Wizkid, in particular, is rapturous. “I am only here to electrify him, to electrify his visual frequency,” she says. Primping him in Gucci greens and icy accessories, she is “witnessing a first-generation African boy level up” exponentially, which isn’t exactly ordinary in the music biz, but to Binns, his ascent to stardom is momentous. “Wiz is special, but that doesn’t mean it is easy to work with someone like him – someone who is as smart, as talented, as dedicated as him – because they are busy, and they are constantly working on their craft,” she remarks. “Very rarely do you see an artist last more than 10 years and stay this popular. Wizkid could be one of the greats.”
There’s one thing that Binns wants to make clear, though: “I don’t chase money, I chase ideas.” And it’s with this disposition that she’s become a peerless polymath with legendary status in the arena of high- fashion styling. “It feels fantastic for me to be doing what I’ve been doing for 30 years and still be coming up with stuff as fresh as anybody who is 21. It means I never lost touch,” she reflects. “Age only brings more knowledge.”
Binns is what we refer to here at 10 Towers as a “crown cool girl”, but what makes her such an enigma is unwavering authenticity. “I don’t follow trends. I might ride with them but I’ll come up with something a little bit more refreshing.”
This ingenuity stems from her youth, the austerity and pride that come with growing up in Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighbourhood. “My MO was making a name. I’m ‘that’ girl that’s gonna tell you the truth, that’s gonna make you laugh, that’s going to understand when you’re going through it and that’s always going to wear the right shit,” she says with a laugh. “If that’s what they call ‘cool’, then that’s great, but I haven’t changed. I’m still that girl from Brooklyn, now I’m just worldwide.”
By that same token, her essence is utterly hip hop. “Hip hop is a form of rebellion and a state of mind. It’s a way of saying something that people don’t always want to hear, but they need to hear,” Binns explains. “When I saw Pharrell take over [the] Pont Neuf [bridge, for Louis Vuitton] and Jay-Z came out saying, ‘Allow me to reintroduce myself’, that was hip hop. It’s like, when you pull up and you just land.”
Growing up in a tough neighbourhood, Binns would escape into cinema. Even into adulthood she possessed an inspirational soft spot for Russian auteur Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible or British filmmaking legends Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, both screenplays from the 1940s.
But she’s also largely inspired by James Baldwin, not only because of his writing, but because he was a “person of culture” who “stuck to his guns”. He was hip hop. Like Baldwin, everything Binns creates has something to say. “I want to make people think and be inspirational, but at the same time, I know how to sell,” she says. “There are more than enough people shooting fashion because they want to look fierce, but it’s not about what’s fierce – it’s about projecting emotion.” And her two editorials for 10, one here in our women’s mag, the other in our men’s, are exactly that.
Here, wrapped in lavish fake-fur coats and leather frocks, the Swedish-Gambian model Sabina Karlsson, a 35-year-old mother and a certified doula who matches Binns’ formative likeness, romps around in front of the camera in lieu of a time machine. Binns calls Karlsson her “avatar”, a younger woman with “just enough attitude to make you believe it’s [me]”.
The shoot, she says, “is all about the way I am when I’m running somewhere and expressing myself in a more animated way. I’m like an older woman with a childlike manner. It’s just the way I am, the way I live – not taking myself too seriously.”
In one gorgeous tableau, the pseudo-stylist sits on a wooden box, chomping on chips in a form-fitting, twill overcoat. In another, a cigarette is pinched between razor-sharp acrylics. Her rose quartz-coloured hair is in a signature bob, elongated and light as she sports a slinky mesh dress and a baseball snapback.With skinny brows and sharp liner painted onto her distinctively freckled face, Karlsson is at once girly and street, domestic and adventurous, but categorically Karen Binns in every way. “What she was doing is exactly what I would’ve done. That’s why she looks like me,” says Binns.
Karlsson embodies Binns as she has been over the past 20 years, like a tenderfoot doppelganger caught in a time warp. “The last 20 years I’ve had a little too much attitude – probably for protection from being hurt,” she reflects. “But now I’ve been blessed by a brand new pair of glasses which allow me to see everything. It’s a beautiful time in my life because there is nothing like being aware. Now I can avoid negativity and breathe positivity.”In the ’80s, Binns was not only Jean-Michel Basquiat’s friend, but a muse: the hinge between the artist and the wider world. “We became friends because we thought alike,” she recalls. “My favourite thing was dropping by his studio to check on him, to see if he was okay. I would end up staying until two in the morning, eating, talking and hanging out.”
Binns has styled a shoot for the new issue of 10 Men as a tribute to him. “[Basquiat] was the one person that I feel had been really misunderstood. I wanted to show the elegance of a man who was an intellectual and always working with his hands,” she says.“He did everything within three minutes. He would just throw stuff on, he didn’t care what anybody thought. His style was so elegantly simple because he was a poet, without speaking,” she says. “Hopefully he would be very proud. I know if he’s in heaven, he’s like, ‘Yeah girl, let them know who I am. Don’t screw this up!’”
Going forward, Binns’ plans are more of a necessity than a pipe dream. “My plan is to be treated and accepted, just like everyone else in this business,” she declares with a steely determination. “I am a creative, properly, but it’s very rare that I’m treated as one. I am treated as a special project.”Over the years, plenty of people have taken credit for Binns’ work and gotten away with it. She’s also been placed on the back burner in favour of her white counterparts and has been asked to style talent in tasteless, racially appropriative ways.“The whole African diaspora in Europe and fashion brings me back to, as a Black American, the slave trade – it just does. They see us as animals, as if we only look great in photographs if we’re jumping in the air or if our lip liner is [exaggerated] or if we’re dressed as a clown. We’re never accepted to be as chic, as elegant, as intellectual. Everything is extremely overt, over the top, as if we’re cartoon characters in everyone else’s lives. It’s disgraceful. It’s insulting. It’s uninformed,” she says.
“Don’t put us in one category. There’s thousands of us, thousands of categories. If I see one more stripper aesthetic connected to Black culture, I’m going to vomit. I’m not styling anyone like that. I’m not doing that to make everyone feel better.” Binns straight up isn’t interested.“The thing is,” she says, “it’s not always about giving somebody what they want. It’s about giving them what they don’t know they want yet.” That’s pure fashion. That’s Binns.
Taken from issue 71 of 10 Magazine – FASHION, ICON, DEVOTEE – on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
LIFE AND TIMES OF A B-GIRL
Photographer PAUL FRANCO
Fashion Editor KAREN BINNS
Text EMILY PHILLIPS
Model SABINA KARLSSON at Milk Management
Hair CHIAO CHENET at Bryant Artists
Make-up MANTIS LEPRETRE using Byredo
Manicurist MAGDA S using hand cream by Dr Barbara Sturm
Fashion assistant DEVON NICHOLAS
Casting REMI FELIPE
