Ciara’s Lasting Career Is a Testament to Her Community — Interview

For all that Ciara Princess Wilson has going on in her life, she’s remarkably serene.

I meet her outside the entrance of Hotel Bel-Air, where she stands unassumingly, finishing up a phone call before we head inside for lunch. Ciara has mastered the art of relaxed glam — a look that’s sleek enough to be seen in, but comfortable enough to handle a busy day. She’s wearing a loose, black linen jumpsuit and gold bangles she never takes off on both wrists. “I call this the wrist of loooove,” she says. A few of the bangles feature the names of her three children or commemorate a special moment in time, including one for Valentine’s Day gifted to her by her husband, Denver Broncos quarterback Russell Wilson. Her hair is parted in the center and pulled back into a slick ponytail with beautiful texture falling to the middle of her back.

Ciara — 37-year-old, triple-platinum recording artist, dancer, entrepreneur, mom, and wife — is a veteran It Girl (or That Girl, as they are more frequently called today). She hails from the South. Atlanta. Or Decatur, Georgia, to be more exact. Defining the geography of Atlanta does no good when talking about the city’s reputation as a mecca of hip-hop and beauty. “As a collective,” says Ciara, “we all come from different locations within Georgia, but still, it’s just Atlanta. It’s just how it kind of happened naturally.”
Ciara’s career is a testament to that world, that community. She has not only grown up in an area that has had a seismic impact on music, dance, and beauty — she’s been part of shaping these arenas. After lunch, she wants to play music from her upcoming album, the eighth in her catalog, as yet untitled. (The first single, “Jump,” which was released in July, is a twerking extravaganza that pays homage to cheerleaders, her 2022 Sports Illustrated swimsuit-edition cover, and, of course, Black hair.)

Like a number of origin stories that have grown out of Georgia’s famous creative incubator, this one begins with hair. “You would’ve asked me what my job was going to be when I was this eight-year-old girl in Decatur, Georgia,” she says, “and I would’ve told you I’m going to be doing hair. I was going to own hair salons. That was my vision. Hair was a big part of how we expressed in Georgia.”

Between sips of tortilla soup, Ciara tells me a story from those days. Take this moment to imagine a teenage CiCi in her bedroom, situating a track of weave hair in a dresser drawer. She pushes in the drawer, lets the strands hang out, coats the hair in Ampro Pro Styl, then wraps it around a roller. “And then you know what I would do?” She pauses. “Put it in the microwave. You put it in the microwave, so you create the crispy curl.” That is, the perfect, hard-shell, barrel curl for a hard, crisp updo that was popular in the ’90s, now having a revival in magazine editorials. It’s a style you’d see at Freaknik, a spring break festival where students from historically Black colleges and universities across the country convened for a good time. Here, Black beauty and so many different versions of a sky-high updo were on full display. The more outrageous, the more colorful, the more a hairstyle coordinated with your outfit, the more appropriate it was for the affair. The weekend was an extension of a way of life in Atlanta (and the South), where putting on your best look every day is a lifestyle.

Today, a community of Black entrepreneurs and artists choose Atlanta to found their start-ups because of the relatively low cost of living (although that’s changing) and its reputation as a rapidly growing hub for tech and entertainment. It makes sense that the city has also attracted beauty founders, such as Alicia Scott of Range Beauty and Yolanda Owens of Iwi Fresh.

According to Ciara, “there’s something in the water, as they would say. Even down from being a cheerleader growing up in the South. There’s so much sauce, so much character. The people. How we all talk. Sometimes, when I go home, it’s like speaking another language because of our Southern drawl. It’s different. You don’t really know it until you see it. It’s an energy.”

Hair wasn’t teenage Ciara’s only passion. She joined a short-lived girl group, Hearsay, with two others and cut some demos. In 2002, Jazze Pha met Ciara as a songwriter and they made some demos together that would encapsulate Crunk&B, a fusion of crunk music and R&B

pioneered by Atlanta rapper Lil Jon. After graduating from high school, Ciara signed to LaFace Records, run by towering-producers-turned-music-executives Antonio “L.A.” Reid and Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds. Ciara was fit for the crown as princess of this era in hip-hop, but the title ended up being her on-ramp versus the route she would stick to.

When Ciara burst on the scene in 2004 with her first single, “Goodies,” she had strawberry-blonde hair (similar to the shades of red that have been popular this past year), and she wore loose, low-rise pants and a crop top. Today, 2000s fashion has cycled back around, and Ciara is, no doubt, part of the inspiration — i.e., the way she wore those cargo jeans while gliding across the roof of a red low-rider in her “Oh” video. She describes her new album as nostalgic: “From my perspective as an artist,” she says, “I feel like it’s closest to my first album. It’s a lot of bass. There’s a strong R&B core, which is also really fun.” You might say that Ciara is reaching back to reference herself.

So many of Ciara’s most popular songs double as dance tracks and made way for her to claim territory as a talented dancer. Her music organically sparks dance challenges: Troupes who live for the bass that carries some of Ciara’s songs will hurry to create routines that often go viral. Her music carries with it an expectation of movement, and dance is an art form that excels on nearly every social media platform.

Ciara may have made a name for herself as the princess of Crunk&B, but the woman sitting across from me is no longer an adolescent newcomer. She’s an industry veteran. She is ever-present: on the Met Gala red carpet, at international film and art festivals, and attending parties with famous friends such as Kelly Rowland, Vanessa Bryant, and La La Anthony, to name a few. As with so many artists, people like to look to her music for unwritten personal codes or chronological stamps for what she was going through — or pulling herself out of.

“I Bet,” released in 2015 on the album Jackie, feels like a farewell to her previous relationship with the rapper Future. “Level Up,” from the 2019 album Beauty Marks, is a reality check for the masses that announces she is here to stay, that albums of varying success or relationship rumors will not define her career. “Greatest Love” (also 2019), is an ode to her husband. Ciara is happily married. You can tell by the way she talks about Wilson and the two children they have together. (She also has a son with Future.)

All this musical autobiography brings us to one tricky little track, “Ciara’s Prayer,” on Atlanta R&B singer Summer Walker’s album. Ciara laughs off the zealous response to that 2021 song, which has become folklore among fans, as many see in it their own relationship hopes and prayers, with lyrics such as “I pray the next man in my life will be my husband,” and “I am a queen, I deserve to be treated like one.” She doesn’t want to share exactly how she ended up closing out Walker’s album with her own track. “Now, I will say this: I ain’t just have one prayer that I prayed when I was going through some things,” she notes. “I had many a night where I prayed, but I looked at it as a sweet opportunity to spread love and hopefully inspire people and pour some positivity into their hearts as they listen to it and to speak life.”

In an interesting kind of symmetry, Ciara’s latest music video, “Better Thangs,” features Walker. We’re sitting in Ciara’s Range Rover (because a car is the best place to listen to music). She pops open her laptop on the center console and presses play. Ciara and Walker appear onscreen with matching half-up-half-down hairdos in faded pastels, looking like amped-up versions of the Southern women they grew up admiring.

“She’s very hands on with her own videos and knows how she likes to be portrayed. I learned so much in just one day,” Walker says. “She’s also super positive the whole time, from the morning to the night, and always offering lots of good advice, like sisterly advice.”

“We have a great connection,” Ciara says of Walker. “And then obviously, it’s been a mutual thing from a music perspective. I’m obsessed with her tone, and after we spent time together again…I just love her. I love how she has her own pocket of what she does. We bonded as girls. It’s just been easy.”

When you’re with Ciara, text message pings and Instagram notifications light up her phone in a steady stream. But at this moment, she puts aside the celebrity-entrepreneur-mother business and is laser-focused on finding a photo from her first test shoot, when she was signed to LaFace, which became the “Goodies” single cover art. Her cheeks are slightly flushed and corner eye highlights accentuate her almond-shaped eyes.

On set that day, she met Yolonda Frederick-Thompson, who was a makeup artist for TLC and OutKast at the time. “My parents weren’t my managers,” Ciara says, “so I didn’t necessarily have family around me. She and I just bonded really well and she felt like a safe place for me. When I was around her, I felt like I had family with me or my sister. And that was just a natural bond that happened. Every time I would go to her about something, she always had the right advice. She always had advice of care. You could tell she’s like, ‘I have this young girl in my hands, and I’m going to take care of her.’ That’s what I feel like she felt.”

Ciara, to me, reads as that girl you went to middle school with who used body wash on her face and stuck with it because, why fix skin issues that don’t exist? In talking to her, I come to find out that is not far from the truth. Meeting Frederick-Thompson made her realize that imprecise skin care wasn’t going to cut it. She’d need to invest time into taking care of her skin if she wanted to have some longevity. They’ve been working together for almost 20 years, the span of Ciara’s career.

“I always bet on this one because I know what success looks like,” Frederick-Thompson says. “She believes in the power of positive thoughts and words, even from a youngster. She never succumbed to that energy that presses you down when things aren’t going your way. Atlanta has been a huge influence on her sound and I think she’s evolved so that it translates outside of her community.”

Frederick-Thompson is now on the advisory board for OAM (On A Mission), Ciara’s skin-care line that just launched, along with board-certified dermatologist Tiffany Libby, MD, as well as a cosmetic chemist, and a former beauty executive. Ciara announced her skin-care line in August, debuting with five products, each containing the powerful antioxidant vitamin C.

By now, beauty lovers are perhaps a little weary (okay, a lot weary) of celebrity beauty lines. Famous founders receive the most attention when they launch a new brand, but from a bird’s-eye view, the competition for consumer attention is fierce all-around. This doesn’t seem to bother Ciara. It’s something she wants to do. “Honestly, I don’t really think about what everyone else is doing so much because I know the uniqueness of my product,” she says. She does, however, notice that she has joined a kind of sisterhood. “You look around and you’re starting to see more women building out their beauty brands. I think that’s pretty amazing because it shows the power of how you can really build something if you desire to, and it’s also showing you the power of your platform. It’s been amazing to see how women have been taking charge and flipping the way we thought we always had to go through someone to do something. No, you can do it yourself.”

She continues, “I think that’s a really beautiful thing that’s happening. As far as the competitive part of it, all I know is what I built, and I know what I built is something special, and I believe in that. I think whenever something is right, if people receive it, it rises on its own way.”

Ciara already has a fragrance with Wilson, which won a prestigious Pentaward, and is co-owner of Ten To One Rum. She has her own clothing company through The House of LR&C, founded with her husband and also former Lululemon CEO Christine Day. Philanthropy is intertwined in Ciara’s ventures with Wilson. A percentage of sales from their streetwear line Human Nation, for instance, goes to the Why Not You Foundation, a nonprofit centered on children’s health, education, and fighting systemic poverty.

After spending an afternoon with Ciara, there is one clear takeaway: She is driven. Driven by the vision she has for her life. When she sees an opportunity that aligns with her values — values instilled back in Decatur — she takes it. “I’ve always been a very vocal, headstrong kind of girl,” she says. “I’ve always been very clear on my vision, even if my vision is not always spot-on. It’s an expression of who I am.”

Fashion stylist: Herin Choi

Hair: Cesar Ramirez

Makeup: Samuel Paul

Manicure: Ayumi Namaizawa

Set design: Priscilla Lee

Production: Viewfinders

Top Image: Adidas x Gucci corset, Gucci dress. Dinosaur Designs earrings.