Behold: A Solange Fashion Prize!

In these trophies-for-all times, when fashion prizes seem to pop up everywhere you turn, it’s easy for one prize winner to blend into the next. But what if you want your prize to mean a little bit more, generate a little more excitement, and perhaps give something to the finalists that exceeds cash and mere adulation? Considering the playing field is already packed with prizes from the CFDA and LVMH, not to mention players like Mr. Porter and Amiri, you’d need, like, Solange Knowles-level talent to make a dent. Which is exactly what the Woolmark Prize has done, with a new film-based project that sees Solange putting her spin on the work of the fashion prize’s finalists.

Passage, directed by the stylishly languid film artist Wu Tsang, is one of the first projects from Saint Heron, Solange’s newly expanded creative agency. The video demonstrates Knowles’s art director prowess, featuring Dionne Warwick, Pose actor Dominique Jackson, and rapper SahBabii, among others, dressed in the finalists’ goods by it-stylist Ib Kamara and vibing to a soundtrack by the downtown New York-based neo-jazz group Standing On the Corner. Those finalists include Bethany Williams, Casablanca, Kenneth Ize, LECAVALIER, Matty Bovan, and Thebe Magugu. The Woolmark Prize is something of the O.G. fashion accolade—Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld won back in the 1950s, while Emily Bode was last year’s winner. The winner will be announced on June 10th.

“Passage” is Solange’s first film since 2019’s captivating When I Get Home, and the medium is clearly one of her strengths. “I’ve been a longtime fan of Wu Tsang’s work and to be able to work alongside her, the Saint Heron team, and all of the incredible artists and designers in the film, really fortifies the ethos of collaboration and communal creative exchange that we wish to continue to embody,” Knowles said in a statement.

Late last month, Knowles announced her intention to expand Saint Heron, a platform she launched in 2013 to promote Black artists, into a full-fledged agency. “Over time, whether it be through album artwork or stage design or performance pieces, I’ve always tried to create visual work that encompasses expressions my other works cannot communicate,” she told Artnet, “and so the next evolution is for Saint Heron to be able to extend this work through a wider scope of collaborations and projects.” The film marks the first product of this new venture.

The Woolmark finalists are some of the most talked-about young talents in the industry, frequently name-checked by young fashion cognoscenti. The film, somewhere between a music video and a fashion week showcase, is a powerful entry in this long year of fashion designers attempting to navigate the new normal of video media. And Knowles is one of the few popular artists working today whose every move seems designed to expand her pool of collaborators and play with the inaccessible or unusual. She’s up to something much more than merely sprinkling her fairy dust over her partners, as celebrities often do when called to collaborate with brands. Lately, fashion multimedia projects have been stuffed with the same all-star casts and envisioned by a similar roster of names, making too many fashion campaigns and videos indistinguishable from one another. Knowles’s commitment to originality, not to mention her fluency with the art world, which far exceeds that of the average celebrity of her stature, might really shake up the format.