It was nearly 15 years ago that Erykah Badu ignited an early version of an internet firestorm with the release of her risqué video for the song “Window Seat.” Shot in a single take, the video followed Ms. Badu, a Dallas-born singer, as she walked from her car through Dealey Plaza, roughly following the route taken by the motorcade carrying President John F. Kennedy when he was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963.
As she sauntered, casual but determined, along streets filled with passers-by, Ms. Badu performed a slow-motion striptease, gradually shedding her hoodie, shirt, sneakers and then underclothes before collapsing to the ground naked, as if she had been shot. Drawn across Ms. Badu’s back was a single word: Evolution.
Few performing artists have been more committed to the concept of evolution than Ms. Badu, 53, who later explained to her numerous critics that the video was not a stunt, but a sincere act of protest against cultural conformity.
“I know I don’t always have the most popular positions,” Ms. Badu said by phone from Los Angeles. “And it can be offensive to be not conforming. But I’ve always been that kind of human; I’ve never been anything other than that.”
For that reason alone, the timing seems more apt than ever for Ms. Badu to receive the ultimate fashion recognition: On Monday night at the Museum of Natural History in New York, she will receive the fashion icon award by the Council of Fashion Designers of America.
“When she was chosen, it was unexpected by pretty much anybody,” Steven Kolb, the C.F.D.A.’s president, said of the award, which has previously been presented to such disparate honorees as Zendaya, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Pharrell Williams and the socialite CZ Guest. “But then the reaction was, That is so right.”
Conformity was an overriding theme, Mr. Kolb said. That and a growing dread of the algorithmic sameness creeping stealthily into all aspects of design. Call it the Pinterest effect. “People are feeling the sense that we’re moving into a period of being told who we are and what we are and what we can and cannot do,” he added. “So Badu’s unfettered sense of self-expression feels very welcome.”
This is especially true in an era when multinational design houses routinely command obedience from actors on retainer and when professional stylists are so central to celebrity creation that some, like Zendaya’s stylist, Law Roach, anoint themselves “image architects.” It is well established that getting dressed every day is a fundamental expression of self. To do so in a spirit of exploration, playfulness or rebellion can increasingly seem like a transgressive act. And it is tough to name many performers who have embraced fashion as a messaging tool quite as fully as Ms. Badu, who in her early years favored unknown labels over famous ones and who has long made it her disruptive mission to collaborate with designers who are young, Black and, oftentimes, gender-variant.
“I’ve worked with her since I was a teenager,” Myah Hasbany, a 20-something Texan who uses the gender-neutral honorific, said of Ms. Badu. Trained at the Central Saint Martins design school in London, Mx. Hasbany attended Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas, Ms. Badu’s alma mater. Mx. Hasbany first encountered her at an open audition that the singer was staging there for dancers.
“She is not a dancer,” Ms. Badu said of Mx. Hasbany. “But she came in with this suit on,” she added, referring to one of Mx. Hasbany’s bulbous, upcycled crochet creations, “and kept spinning around and I loved that she was a risk taker.”
Since then, Mx. Hasbany’s designs — particularly tubular leg warmers resembling clusters of sprightly sea slugs — have featured in Ms. Badu’s onstage and red carpet wardrobes. “It’s been great to work with someone who doesn’t limit themselves on what can or can’t be fashion,” Mx. Hasbany said.
It has always been that way, said the self-taught designer Rodney Epperson, 65, who is based in New York. Early in Ms. Badu’s career, she began commissioning custom versions of Mr. Epperson’s sensual, often deconstructed designs. She donned them for award shows and was featured wearing a dress of his, paired with gauntlets and a vertiginous headwrap, in the November 1999 issue of Vogue.
“Her vibe is totally creative, and she will test you,” Mr. Epperson said. “You don’t know what she’s going to do next.” To illustrate his point, Mr. Epperson forwarded to this reporter a photograph of a Spin magazine pictorial featuring Ms. Badu clad in a blouse that he had first slashed by hand and then repaired along each fissure with delicately scalloped, merrowed edges.
“What did she do with it?” he asked. “She wore it on her head.”
Even a cursory voyage through a highlight reel of Ms. Badu’s wardrobe experiments is an acid trip through the performer’s distaste for orthodoxies, fashion and otherwise.
Here she is in a ’90s “Sesame Street” appearance wearing an enormous patchwork West-African-style gele. (“We’ve never been friends with anyone who wears, well, what you’re wearing on your head,” said one Muppet character who, quickly won over, soon adopts a turban of its own.)
Here she is dressed in a bustled Victorian gown wax-printed in colors associated with the Bamileke people of Cameroon, which Ms. Badu identifies as her family’s ancestral tribe. Here she is in a white Thom Browne suit-dress combo that she wore to host the Soul Train Music Awards in 2017 — accessorized with a steep-crowned Canadian Mounties hat sprayed white and further adorned with a metal Wxyz sculpture and a wimple purchased at the paint-supply section of Home Depot.
“Authenticity is the strongest power on the planet,” Ms. Badu said before flying to New York to accept her award. “Its frequency and vibration is very high and, when you are truly yourself, aligned with your mission, you become a magnet, attracting everything you need to become who you are.”
