Allow Beyoncé to Guide You Through Her Magnificent, Curated Collection

Just in time for summer wedding/funeral/hot-dog-eating-contest/hot-dog-themed funeral/funeral-themed wedding season, our gal Beyonce has “curated” a collection of dresses and accessories over at Rent the Runway. (That sound you hear is a bunch of curatorial studies grad students wailing into the ether.) So, in case you were dying to know which small, bland cocktail dresses are most likely to make him “put a ring on it,” get thee to RTR! (Next week: Beyonce “curates” your grocery deliveries! It’s mainly edible gold leaf and whole live ostriches.)

The best part, obviously, of RTR’s “Beyonce Boutique” is the original captions written by Bey-Bey herself—detailing the personal story behind how and why she chose each piece. Here are a few of our favorites.

He languished on the veranda, puckish quicksilver bangs glancing in the louche Amazon sunrise.

“Fog’s low,” he growled, eyes half-shut, khaki-clad thighs rippling like shaved otters, “The arapaima will be swarming upriver. Are you sure you’re ready for this? Are you sure you’re ready to face…a monster?”

Sigh.

“I suppose.”

“We’re going to need some sort of enormous, garish, impenetrable tablecloth to dazzle and then contain the beasts while I rush them from behind with my Moldovan Ferryman’s Deep-Water Crossbow (p. 72). I once urinated on the headman of a nearby village after he was attacked by Yukon spider-bees, we can stop there and—”

“Jeremy,” I cut in, eyes suddenly sharp as an arapaima’s milk-fang. “No need. No. Need.”

I would never make it to the top of the dune. I knew I would never make it. Crawling would be my eternity. Sand would be my food. Heat, my man. Sorry, Jay.

Suddenly, it pirouetted through my memory like a dream, like a dimly remembered lullaby sung by the kind of sturdy Slavic wet nurse that they just don’t make anymore (wet nurses these days, I lamented, chuckling at my own impudence in the brittle face of death). The memory trickled in: A conversation. A conversation over oiled figs with a diminutive barber-surgeon in a Moorish bazaar in those heady, opaline days before the war.

“The secret is in the shoulders,” he had said, winking at me with those rheumy mole eyes you find in all desert craftsmen. “Human heat, it travels from the groins, up through the heart, and it settles deep into the shoulders where it burns, it boils, it fights to be freed. All the desert peoples—we know this. Free the shoulders, free the heat, free the man.”

“But what of the shoulder bugs?” I asked, quaking, no naif when it came to desert vermin.

“Oh, just sew some flippy-flappy things on there or something. You’ll be fine.”

As the memory dissipated, I smiled and groped in my rucksack for my shoulder-shears. “I’m a survivor,” I whispered to a passing chameleon.

The chameleon did not reply.

Destiny Fulfilled…And Lovin’ It Tour, 2005. I took a brief “me-time” hiatus on Richard Branson’s replica of the Mayflower to recover from what Gwyneth so rakishly calls “Rosé Elbow.” Am I working hard, I wondered…or am I hardly working? I know that I have time to lean, so why can’t I seem to find any time to clean?

I was fulfilled. But could I really say I was lovin’ it?

Sipping the bulgur milk mouth-blended for me by my live-in herbalist Aquafina, I hissed. Damn this elbow. Who says they didn’t have fucking straws on the Mayflower.

A buckle-shod pilgrim staggered by, ravaged by on-trend period tuberculosis. Branson. He thinks of everything. I glanced down at the sputum glistening on the freshly tarred deck. He even got the right strain. Classic Branson.

But two could play at this game. I could do “vintage” too. I slipped out of my Branson-issued oxhair underwoolens and into my jersey 2002 Senior Slam mall dress, feeling persimmon and imperious.

I looked out across the roiling sea.

I coughed.

Under the patient yet carnal eye of Gianbaptiste, I squatted in first the honey, then the panko.