Of course, when Beyoncé launches a range of athletic wear—aka “ath-leisure”—the result is a transcendent video that will make your day a thousand times better. Instead of being too overtly about selling fashion, the video is a resonant, tingling call to be your better self.
The hard sell for Ivy Park, Beyoncé’s workout clothing range, is less bombastic than Kanye West’s recent takeover of Madison Square Garden, and more an inspirational, deeply felt mini-memoir, majoring on self-belief and tenacity.
The video is as kickass as any brilliant Beyoncé performance, if a little quieter, say, than her Coldplay-obliterating Super Bowl performance last month.
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Ivy Park was debuted on Thursday, and in the accompanying video Beyoncé is pictured at Parkwood Park in Houston, Texas, which—she says in a voiceover—remains a bedrock and inspiration today.
The line will be available for sale in store and online from April 14. It will be sold in North America in Topshop, Nordstrom, and Hudson Bay.
Over a series of images of the singer stretching, running, doing rope-work, boxing, swimming, hanging in hoops, skipping rope, in sun and in rain, we see her in the park of her childhood, and at the end carrying a little girl—her daughter, Blue Ivy, whom the new line is most likely named after, and who is seen in the video clinging to Beyoncé’s back, wearing her own kids’-size version of the new fashion line.
The Daily Beast has contacted Beyoncé’s representatives for comment on the new venture.
In her own beautifully spoken words, Beyoncé relates how, as a girl, she would wake up in the mornings to her dad knocking on her bedroom door telling her it was time to go running.
“I remember wanting to stop, but I would push myself to keep going. It taught me discipline.”
On these runs she would think about her dreams, and the sacrifices her parents made for her, and about her little sister “and how I was her hero.”
She would also look at the beauty around her, the sunshine flickering through the trees: “I would keep breathing.”
In the images on the two-minute video, we see her in black T-shirts, crop tops, sports bras, leggings, headbands, hoodies, sleeveless hoodies, shorts, baseball cap, all emblazoned with the Ivy Park logo.
This is not Beyoncé’s first fashion line: in 2006, she and her mother launched the House of Deréon. The label failed, and folded in 2012.
The Ivy Park line was first announced by Topshop owner Sir Philip Green in an October 2014 interview with WWD.
This is not a collaboration,” Green said at the time. “This is about building a brand and building a business—a separate, proper business, with separate overhead and a separate office.”
Green said he and Beyoncé had met in London the previous February. “We started talking generally, about doing something together. We’ve been looking at that [athletic] sector for a while. It’s something we need to be in. Based on what she does, how she works out, the conversation got into that category. We started getting into proper conversation in May or June, as to how it would work. It took six or eight weeks to put a deal together.”
Then, “Beyoncé came to our office for the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle.”
“I have always loved Topshop for their fashion credentials and forward thinking,” Beyoncé was quoted as saying.
“There are things I’m still afraid of,” the singer intones towards the end of the video released Thursday. “When I have to conquer those things I still go back to that park. Before I hit the stage I go back to that park. When it was time for me to give birth, I went back to that park.
“The park became a state of mind. The park became my strength. The park is what made me who I am. Where’s your park?”
