As her star ascends, Bree has commanded the attention of the icons she grew up listening to and watching on MTV. When Lady Gaga’s music video for “LoveGame” premiered in March 2009, 16-year-old Bree thought, ‘Oh, this is my bitch, I love her,’ noting that the styling within the video played around with leather, denim and vintage Chanel, which she had gravitated towards. So when the star’s producer, BloodPop, contacted Bree about hopping on Dawn of Chromatica, a remix album of Gaga’s 2020 LP Chromatica, she was like, “What? What’s going on?!” She picked the track “Babylon” but delayed writing her verse for weeks due to fear of disappointing her idol. “I didn’t want to let her down!” she laughs. “But in the end, it worked out perfectly, and they loved it.” When she @-ed Missy Elliott on Twitter in March 2020 saying “come and collect me mommy! Hop on the remix 4 me”, after her track “APESHIT” drew comparisons with the hip-hop legend (Missy responded with “keep shin- ing mama”) she couldn’t have imagined that just ten months later Missy would end up being the missing puzzle-piece for her track “ATM”: “I remember I dropped ‘Gucci’ and her team reached out and was like, ‘Yeah, she wants to do something with [you],’ and ‘ATM’ was the song of mine that felt incomplete. And I was like, please send this to her, Jordan – Jordan is the A&R – and see if she likes it. She liked it, and then we got cracking!”
As the self-proclaimed “dark-skinned Christian Dior poster girl” of the early 00s, Brown is also a one-time muse to John Galliano. His AW00 collection for Dior drew inspiration from the hip-hop high life, and its ‘Super Fly Girls’ submerged in fur and the iconic (and heavily referenced) newspaper print were an identity-defining moment for young Bree. “When I was a kid, I begged my mum for the pink monogram purse. I ended up getting it, I don’t know how, but she made it happen. That was my first Dior piece, and I just love what Foxy and that whole Galliano link-up brought to fashion for me as a dark-skin girl.” Clearly, Bree never let go of these early fashion obsessions. “I don’t even like shopping in-store, I always shop backwards,” says the singer, whose closet is reportedly full of archive pieces. “I said as soon as I get more money, that’s what I’m gonna do, and that’s what I do!”
With Galliano having Foxy and both Marc Jacobs and Donatella Versace having Lil Kim, Bree had her heart set on a muse-like relationship of her own. “I really wanted to be Karl Lagerfeld’s muse one day; that was a goal of mine. I was like, God, I really hope we form a close relationship and do something crazy with Chanel,” she says. “But there are so many new designers we could eventually link up with and do something crazy. Demna [Gvasalia] for Balenciaga would be cool because I love the spirit of Balenciaga; it could go anywhere at any time, and that’s my spirit.” She recently acquired a pair of furry black Balenciaga sunglasses, the latest Bree Runway staple, which she set her sights on after a Twitter user quote-tweeted a picture of them with the comment, “Don’t let Bree Runway see these.” Bree remembers thinking, “Hang on a second... furry glasses? That is a bit of me, mate! And they’re Balenciaga? Forget about it!” The glasses, which were sold out, were sourced after a 24-hour search aided by fans working in Balenciaga stores from Miami to Paris.
Today, Bree usually collaborates with her costume design team to make custom outfits – the baby-blue fluffy bikini worn in her “ATM” video was the result of an “embarrassing” sketch of hers that her team brought to life. “I pull together inspiration from so many themes,” she explains. “I like how palm trees look, for example; I’m in front of a palm tree right now and it reminds me of this synthetic hair we made as a fringe for the arms of my gloves for my live shows. And with that, I think, ‘OK, there’s a fan on when the picture’s being taken. How can we maximise movement in absolutely everything?’ The hair, the hair on the gloves, everything. I want everything to look like an absolute movie.”
A born-and-raised east Londoner, Bree’s instincts for risk-taking stylistic choices were nurtured in the city’s eclectic streets. “Growing up in east, I saw freedom,” says the artist, born Brenda Wireko Mensah to Ghanaian parents. Her mum would make costumes for her and her school friends at home. “She was like our Tina Knowles. I remember the first costume she made for us – we went fabric shopping, and I really wanted something snake- skin. We made this snakeskin zig-zag shirt and this one-armed thing – that was our performance outfit. I wore these chunky Demonia-style boots; I don’t know where the hell I got those from.” Out on the streets, Bree found inspiration in the many different subcultures that call Hackney home. “People were trying different shit. My neighbour would go out with pink hair one day, blue hair [another] day, and I just loved that. There were so many different cliques. There were the lot dressed in the punk stuff, the more street Nike squad, the more preppy girls and the Colombian girls. There was so much differ- ent shit I could pull from. The Colombian girls gave me the kick up the ass to wear Von Dutch low-rise jeans. I still have all my Von Dutch shit right now!” It’s no coincidence that the east London girl has a global appeal, and even as her star ascends, she feels that the vibrancy of her hometown can be found in her music. “There’s a grittiness to my music, a cockiness that’s so east London. In east London, if you’re on some different shit, you’ve got to have the confidence to stand by it.”
Recently, Bree has been writing and recording her forthcoming debut album across various studios in Los Angeles. It’s an intentional setting for this process – on her first recording trip to LA in summer 2021, she met up with former Danity Kane and Diddy-Dirty Money member Dawn Richard, another genre-defying artist whose catalogue is as eclectic as Bree’s own. She recalls having “one of the most important conversations of [her] life”. “She put a red-underline under how blessed I am, as a dark-skin girl, to be doing what I’m doing and for it to be received the way it’s been received,” says Bree. “Because it’s not common for us to be doing the things we do and for it to cross over the way it’s crossing over. Slowly but surely, Bree Runway is becoming global.” Among the global connections she’s establishing, Bree is making the best use of LA as she feels that her collaborators stateside simply get it. “My collaborators here speak the language that I want to put into the music. They just get it.” She cites Benny Cassette and Glasgow-born Hudson Mohawke, who both worked on Kanye West’s Yeezus and The Life of Pablo albums, and Charli XCX producer EASYFUN as some of the people bringing her work to life. She’s tight-lipped on the exact contents of the album but says audiences should “expect to hear Bree Runway in a way you’ve never [heard her] before. Everything you love? Expect it times ten. It’s just going to be so elevated.” She in- tends to dovetail her signature boss-bitch anthems with more pensive, meditative moments. New sounds and visuals but with the distinct familiarity of her brand: “The vocal range is going to be on full display in a way you haven’t heard before – it’s just gonna feel like fashion, emotion, a party, a cry with your girls, everything Bree Runway is.”
This is certainly true of the two tracks I’m sent through to preview, which I’m told will not appear on the album, though they may feature in the setlist for Bree’s shows in New York and LA. The first is “Just Fine”, in which Bree’s smooth vocals glide over spacey 80s-style synth bass and 808s, reminiscent of soulful and funky tracks like Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King’s “Love Come Down” and Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know”. While she did not have a direct inspiration for the track, Bree tells me, “I do love songs from the 80s and the feeling it [gives you], just those songs you can play at the cookout and we all dance to it. That’s what ‘Just Fine’ reminds me of.” The track sees Bree celebrating a post-breakup glow-up and finding power in choosing herself: “Now that I’m letting you go / got them rich bitch fancy clothes.” “I wanted to do an anthem, in the most joyful way, [that was like], ‘Listen, you can get over that man, pack his shit up and throw it all out!’” she explains. The second track I previewed, “That Girl”, is an entirely different sound, still taking on those themes of self-confidence and self-assertion, but with a deep house beat which takes you to the ballroom. It rockets between tempos as Bree sings, “Get the cash, get the money, better spend that, girl / If you bad and you know it, better show out girl.”
Bree’s Ghanaian heritage has left a strong imprint on her visuals and sound. Some of her fondest childhood memories are of attending Ghanaian hall parties, she says: “That was my shit. I used to love going; I loved the aunties with the epic fake Gucci, the overlined lips, the make-up, the cool hair, the dance moves, the semi-competitiveness between outfits. I found it so fun and so funny.” And she regularly listens to throwback Ghanaian tunes, citing a group called City Boys. “I love their leader, The Black Chinese, and they've got really cool melodies. The instrumentation is amazing." She also mentions the music of Congolese songwriter Koffi Olomidé, which she loves for its guitar sound – “I’m a guitar girl,” she says, a fact you could probably glean from the opening electric guitar lick of “APESHIT”. She says that the music she has created and what’s still to come on her upcoming album are inseparable from this Ghanaian identity: “The pockets I hit melody-wise are different, and that comes from me being a Ghanaian girl, 100%. Like, there’s a sort of pizzazz that I deliver, and if you know me and how silly I am when I dance to African music, it’s literally that in a musical form.”
”I’m like a pick-and-mix. My formula is do whatever the fuck you want” - Bree Runway
Bree is often one of those artists who is spoken of as just shy of her destination. I suppose performing at Soho Desert House, six miles from Coachella, is quite emblematic, so I ask her what success really looks like for her. If she feels like she’s becoming the pop princess she envisioned when she was a child with her eyes glued to the television watching the greats. “I think success looks like me wrapping up an album that I’m really happy with, and whatever happens, happens,” she answers. She wants to remain grounded, too, no matter her success, and family is everything to her – her mother is still a point of call for last-minute costume alterations. She laughs about how her once-tricky relationship with her younger sibling, Nathan, has mellowed, as she “partially raised him” and helped “shape his style and confidence”. There’s a beautiful photo of the two of them on her Instagram in matching Miu Miu gloves – she had bought him a black pair then realised she wanted a pair of her own so she grabbed them in baby blue. But being grounded is compatible with starry ambi- tion, even essential to it, as she continues to pursue her own definition of success. What does the future look like? “It looks like me getting to that inevitable top destination that I’m going to get to and being happy and feeling balanced and at peace inside. That’s very important. I don’t want to lose myself to some flashing lights. I’m not that sort of girl.”
Source: https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/56213/1/bree-runway-coach-london-balenciaga
Credits:
Hair EVANIE FRAUSTO at STREETERS using REDKEN, make-up MARCELO GUTIERREZ at BRYANT ARTISTS using M.A.C, nails DAWN STERLING, set design HEATH MATTIOLI at FRANK REPS, photographic assistants STEPHEN WORDIE, JACK BUSTER, DOMINIQUE ELLI, styling assistants ALI CLAIRE MARINO, LAUREN BENSKY, PATRICK LOPAZE, BOTA ABDUL, hair assistant MARIN MULLEN, make-up assistant CHRISTOPHER FINLEY, set design assistants DEVIN TOLENDANO, digital operator BENOIST LECHEVALLIER, production DANA BROCKMAN at VIEWFINDERS, production coordinator MOLLY O’BRIEN, production assistant DIN MORRIS
