Beyoncé Stole My Wedding Dress: On Resentments and Failure

I’m not a cool girl. I’m cool in the sense that I’m warm and approachable. But I’m not streetwear cool. I’m not Virgil-Abloh-architect-turned-designer-who-had-a-special-moment-of-recognition-with-Kanye-West cool. I’m not Off-White cool.

But maybe—just maybe—I could one day have enough money to wear cool. Maybe, for a few hours, I could leave behind my warm, smiling self and slip into the skin of a girl who’s comfortable with silence, who takes her desires as seriously. Like Khadja Nin on her Wale Watu music video, or, her aesthetic daughter Tems.

Then I saw the dress. It’s a T-shirt corset dress that flows into a tulle ballgown, dipped in lime green at the hem. It was perfect. It was my dress.

Virgil Abloh’s Off-White ball gown dress by the late fashion designer Virgil Abloh

It’s designed by Virgil Abloh’s Off-White -- when I saw Virgil Abloh’s designes, I knew I could either have children or wear his designs. I choose the latter.

Every princess has her regular dress and her dress-dress. This dress is my dress-dress. For most women, our dress-dress is what we find for our wedding day. Rebecca Mead calls it the “oh, Mommy” feeling—it’s that moment when you put on the dress, turn to your mother, and say “Oh, Mommy,” because you’ve found the one. You know it’s the dress when someone starts crying. It’s either you, your mother, or your mother-in-law (because she’d better be grateful her son landed a Rockstar like you—as opposed to those mothers-in-law who think the sun shines out of their sons’ asses, which, fine, it does, because you’re marrying him, so clearly you like him—hopefully love him—enough to bind your life to his).

Anyway—someone has to cry. I cried when I saw my dress. A wedding dress is supposed to be you but better. And this dress was me but better. It’s a T-shirt ballgown: hip-hop and drama, two descriptors that rarely go together. Hip-hop is cool, not dramatic. But this dress made it okay to be hip-hop and girly, cool and sweet. So, of course, Beyoncé took my dress. Because she’s all those things: cool but earnest, dramatic and unbothered.

Beyoncé wearing a Virgil Abloh'S Off-White ballgown t-shirt dress

And if Beyoncé’s wearing it, there’s no way I could ever afford it. I could try to seduce Jeff Bezos, but I don’t have enough plastic surgery to catch his attention, so shrug.

So here I am.

I next saw the dress while watching a YouTube video of Beyoncé’s Renaissance concert. She was singing “Resentment.”

Resentment: a bitter indignation at being treated unfairly.

When I first saw the performance, I didn’t know what to do with the fact that my dress was being worn for that song. It’s from her B’Day album— so it’s a song I’ve carried with me for a long time, its one of those songs you sing as a child while practicing how to have big feelings, only to understand it years later when life does what life does. I’ve been lucky that my resentment has nothing to do with my fiancé. But it has everything to do with my degree.

I was in a Ph.D. program at Duke University. I was going to study African literature and masculinity. I was going to write a good enough dissertation. I was going turn it into a public-facing work of scholarship, and be interviewed by Trevor Noah—like Michelle Alexander was for The New Jim Crow. I was going to come out in a lilac tulle dress with sparkly makeup and talk about how men are suffering and how we need to empower them. Then I’d turn that interview into performance art, on patriarchy induced sympathy for the masculinity crisis created by men. I was going to do big things. I was going to do big things.

And now? All I have is resentment.

Resentment toward my advisor, who postponed the exams that would grant me my master’s degree and allow me to begin writing my dissertation—because my work was “not sufficiently scholarly,” but she was “confident you can do this with clearer guidance.”

With clear guidance? Is she telling on herself?

Enter Beyoncé’s Resentment:

“I wish I could believe you, then I'd be all right But now everything you told me really don’t apply To the way I feel inside…”

I believed it was my fault that I was not scholarly enough. I believed her when she said no one every finishes their exam lists. I believed her when she said I could just tell her what I have and have not read. I believed her when she said I was ready. But then everything she told me didn’t apply when it mattered. To cut a long, painful story short, I failed my exams.

In the debriefing conversation, she told me she had done me a favor by allowing me to take them again—only for me to find out it was university policy.

She lied. She blamed me. Me?

The conversation ended with her saying,

“I am not your teacher—I am Dr. X. And if you ever doubt me, look at this shelf and know that I know what I’m doing.”

It was like Ozymandias speaking from a place unseen, claiming that he is king of kings,

“look upon my work yet mighty and despair.”  

She pointed up toward a shelf that, based on her words, was all the work she had done over her academic career. Just then something clicked: she had often spoken of creating an academic persona suggesting I use my last name Vilakazi as the origin story. Benedict Wallet Vilakazi was the first black person to earn their PhD in South Africa and when she saw my last name on application she wondered if I was a relative. It struck me that she placed her work at the uppermost place in her office. And she should— it’s her damn office. But it also occurred to me that in placing her persona on a literal alter, every day she came into her office and worked under the spectre of her persona. Like Foucault's panopticon— always being watched, looked down. You don’t know if someone is actually there, just the terror of the possibility that they might.

A year later, it was no surprise that I failed my chapter meeting. And by the way, “chapter meetings” are supposed to be meetings in which we meet, not assessments you can fail.

But by then, nothing surprised me. I stayed and earned my masters, but the second fail was the straw that broke my back.

Between failing my exams and deciding to leave the program, I got engaged. Anthropologists Cele Otnes and Elizabeth peck note that “Time after time, brides pinpoint the act of crying as their moment of discovery and epiphany.” (100) And that feels correct for me in a roundabout way. I cried when I failed my chapter. I cried when I decided to leave the program. And I cried on my final day at Duke as a PhD student.

And now—that dress should be mine.