It’s been a decade since Tina Knowles started dictating her life story into her phone for her grandchildren and future great-grandchildren. She wanted them to know their history – her early life and world were so different from theirs, she might as well have been from another planet. Knowles, the youngest of seven, born to a docker and seamstress, grew up poor in segregated Texas. Her grandchildren, born to Knowles’s superstar daughters, Beyoncé and Solange, are growing up in Los Angeles and New York with unimaginable wealth, but under unimaginable scrutiny.
A couple of years ago, Knowles started writing a book that was supposed to be her behind-the-scenes take on the outfits she had created for her daughters’ music careers – the dazzling triple-denim looks she had cobbled together from fabric remnants and army-surplus stores, with almost no budget, for Beyoncé’s group Destiny’s Child in the 1990s. She was still improvising costumes once Beyoncé had gone solo and could have her pick of designer clothes; even the singer’s spectacular recent Renaissance tour had input from her mother.
