On today’s episode of “Daily Variety” podcast, entrepreneurs Tina Knowles and Ashley Graham explain how they have blazed trails to build powerful media and retail brands in highlights from a day’s worth of conversations held at Variety’s annual Entertainment Marketing Summit.
The daylong event held in Beverly Hills featured sessions with the industry’s top marketers, brand managers, creators, talent representatives, ad sales executives and media buyers. Videos for all sessions can be found here.
Listen to today’s “Daily Variety” podcast here:
Knowles, in a conversation with Angelique Jackson, Variety‘s senior entertainment writer, recalled her early days of dressing Destiny’s Child, the musical trio that launched her daughter Beyoncé to global stardom.
“I was doing everything out of necessity. It wasn’t because and I didn’t know I was producing, I didn’t know I was creative director, and that term wasn’t even a thing then. I was just doing what needed to be done, and a lot of times never given credit for it. And I was OK with that. I actually liked hiding and being in the background,” Knowles said. “And I realized when I look back on it that I was literally this country woman with this big hair from Texas with this thick accent. And I would go into a TV show like ‘The Tonight Show’ and have to fight with the lighting director. And they’d be like, ‘Who? This is somebody’s mama, get her out of here! And they didn’t take me seriously. But I would be a pest. And I would say, I’m sorry, but you got four Black girls, you need more light on them. And they’d be like, ‘Who are you to tell me about lighting?’ But I was doing all these things and I didn’t feel enough. I guess I didn’t feel like I was professionally trained, so I would just be OK with somebody kind of pushing me to the side.”
Graham, a supermodel and pioneer for plus-size women in the fashion industry, and her UTA agent Natasha Bolouki spoke to Jennifer Maas, Variety’s senior business writer, TV and video games, about Graham’s work in designing apparel lines with retailer JC Penney. And Graham told the backstory of how she came to do a six-week stint on Broadway as Roxie Hart in Chicago – despite the fact that she’s never worked as a singer nor a hoofer before.
Ashley Graham at Variety‘s Entertainment Marketing Summit, presented by Deloitte (Photo by Savion Washington/Variety)
Variety via Getty Images
“Now, friends — I don’t sing, I don’t act, and I definitely don’t dance. But for some reason, I had it in my head that this was a goal of mine. And I’m a big manifester. I have the yellow pad every year. I’m writing my three or four pages and we’re getting it done. We’re putting it on the mirror and the walls. And when I first met Natasha and the whole team, they asked me what was the biggest dream I had that maybe hadn’t come true yet? And that was one of them. I kid you not,” Graham said.
“Two months later, ‘Chicago’ calls and they’re like, ‘We want you to come in for an audition.’ I was not ready. I had no idea what I was doing. I spent my own money and I went and got the best music teacher, dance teacher, acting teacher. I nailed the audition. I was Roxie Hart in ‘Chicago’ for six weeks on Broadway, and UTA really helped me and made that happen,” she said. “And what that did for me is it made me say, I need to dream bigger. Because if something like that, where I’m not born with the skill set and I have to go and get trained for it, that means there’s a lot of training that could be happening for anything that I really want.”
(Pictured top: Tina Knowles)
Listen to Daily Variety on iHeartPodcasts, Apple Podcasts, Variety’s YouTube Podcast channel, Amazon Music, Spotify and other podcast platforms.
Leave a Reply