The Fug Girls may have found Solange Knowles’s newly shaved head regrettable, but the singer better known as Béyoncé’s sister talks about losing her tresses like she just got freed from kryptonite. Apparently, she breaks out the electric razor every few years, whenever she feels like her hair has become evil and grown beyond her control. “I did it once when I was 16 and again when I was 18,” she said backstage at BCBG. “I just need to kind of start over and liberate myself and feel empowered. I feel like so many women put so much of their power in their hair, and I was succumbing to that — like, spending so much time and money and energy on my hair.”
And right now, Knowles needs that head space to wrap her mind around moving to Brooklyn. That’s right: That sighting of Solange with B and Jay-Z at the Grizzly Bear free concert on the Williamsburg waterfront was not a fluke. Solange says all her friends live there, and she’s buddies with the band, so she took “my sister and my bro” to see them, thinking they’d be inconspicuous among mild-mannered indie rockers. Yeah, right.
In any case, Solange says she starts her apartment search next week, and she’s thinking Park Slope or Brooklyn Heights, some place near her mom and two sisters, who all live in Kings County. And since she has a 5-year-old son, she wants someplace with a yard. But first she has to sell either her house in Houston or her house in L.A., because being a single mom with three mortgages “ain’t gonna happen.” And that yard has proved to be a reality check about New York real estate. “Everyone’s like, ‘And it has a yard!’ And you see pictures, and it’s just a little garden,” she says. “We’re balling on a budget here!” Ah, coming to grips with the idea that your income buys you only a third of what it would buy you in any other city? Solange, you may soon be a New Yorker after all.
