How Beyoncé used fashion in "Black is King" The new visual album by Beyoncé is, in its essence, an ode to black beauty

It was Beyoncé who chose Tyler Mitchell as photographer for the September edition of Vogue in 2018, making the then 23-year-old from Atlanta the first African American photographer to shoot a Vogue cover: «until there will be a mosaic of perspectives coming from different ethnic groups behind the lens, we will continue to have a narrow view of what the world really is like. When I started 21 years ago, I was told that it was difficult for me to get into magazine covers because black people didn't sell», Beyoncé said in the following interview.

Beyoncé learned about Tyler Mitchell's work right on Instagram, a digital place where - as happened with Twitter for Black Lives Matter - it was and is much easier for black artists to avoid gatekeepers, break down old barriers and arrive without any kind of disintermediation. It is the process that also the art critic Antwuan Sargent told in his book "The Black New Vanguard", where thanks to the role of digital he had managed to collect the works of avant-garde black artists and photographers, or even that through which Kim Jones and Dior have decided to collaborate with the artist Amoako Boafo for the latest collection of the maison. And in this digital and cross-sectoral universe that art - and by art we can also mean Beyoncé's work - is getting closer to fashion to try to tell the stylistic features of a culture that becomes increasingly important and relevant. As Tyler Mitchell said in a recent interview with the Times: "photography and fashion images are an interesting way of talking about my community, through clothing", just like Beyoncé did in "Black is King".