The fashion designer talks about his adoration for his longtime client, who passed away in 2021, whether he’d ever let another star wear the actress’ signature looks and the mega-hat she wore to Aretha Franklin’s funeral: “She resisted the idea.”
When Cicely Tyson started crafting her 2021 memoir Just As I Am, her longtime friend and fashion designer, B Michael, began to conceptualize an idea for a book of his own, cataloging their working relationship together from the day the barrier-breaking actress first stepped foot in his atelier in 2005.
“She loved it and said that would be great and amazing, but [told the designer] ‘Help me finish my book first,’” B Michael recalls, laughing.
When Tyson passed away on Jan. 28, 2021, just two days after her memoir was published, B Michael put his book idea on the back burner.
Now three years later, MUSE Cicely Tyson and Me: A Relationship Forged in Fashion, has come to fruition from publisher Harper Collins. In it, B Michael pairs the looks he created for Tyson over the last 16 years of her life with both the historical context and personal emotion tied to each event. Those moments include Tyson choosing him to design her a red dress for the national Heart Truth show during Fashion Week in 2009 — rather than choose from the list of suggested designers when she walked the celebrity runway — or how she would tell reporters who asked what she was wearing on red carpets, “Why, it’s B Michael.”
Among the high-profile events where Tyson wore designs by B Michael were when she won an honorary Oscars in 2018; to the Emmy Awards in 2017; and to the CFDA Awards in 2014.
One of the most talked-about B Michael looks the actress wore was to Aretha Franklin‘s funeral, a design that included an enormous black hat. In an interview with THR that ran in 2021 when her memoir was released, Tyson said of working with B Michael: “Sometimes I don’t get [a dress] until the day of the event. But when I get it, you can bet your bottom dollar it stops the show.”
Explains B Michael of working on the book, “The original thought that I had was that the book would be a chronological
narrative with captions on the looks and so forth, however the publisher felt that I needed to dig deeper. And I will say that I loved digging deeper because that process became cathartic. It really was a wonderful journey to relive all those moments and to feel Cicely’s presence and cope with her transition.