My dirty jeans helped Beyonce hit the big time . . . and I’ve still got them!
HER Renaissance world tour kicked off in Stockholm on Wednesday — almost exactly 20 years after she began her worldbeating solo career with the release of the album Dangerously In Love.
That record, which helped Beyonce to six Grammys and remains one of the best- selling of the millennium, famously featured on its cover the singer wearing a top comprised of rows of diamonds, and a pair of low- slung ( and dirty) men’s jeans.
Photographer Markus Klinko was the man behind the now-iconic image (left). And he told me this week that not only were those his jeans — but he still has them.
Klinko told me: ‘Beyonce wanted to do something which looked like a famous picture I had taken of the model Laetitia Casta, lying on a diamond spider-web. So her mom had brought along the diamond top.
‘But when it came to it Beyonce wasn’t happy, because there was nothing to wear on the bottom half that she liked. I said: “Well, wear denim — that will work.” But she hadn’t brought anything.
‘I told her: “You can wear my jeans if you like — you might fit them.” And that was that.’
He adds: ‘ Once she got those jeans on and the diamond top she got very excited and she put her arms up. It was probably just 30 seconds of magic and I caught it and said to her: “Now I have the album cover.” We kept going for hours more, but we both knew that we had got it already. The power of the image was that it showed the artist she was going to become.’
As with his pictures, work is done after the shoot to make the subject look flawless or, as Klinko put it, ‘floating in divine perfection’.
The Beyonce cover changed his life. Afterwards, Mariah Carey requested that he shoot her for The Emancipation Of Mimi album cover.
And Britney Spears also followed suit.
Meanwhile, L’Oréal, who’d had Beyonce under contract for years, said they hadn’t managed ‘to get her to look the way she looked in that image’ — so they hired him, too.
As for those jeans, Beyonce wore them out of the studio but later returned them to Klinko, who still has them, safely stowed in a drawer.
He gets offers for them, but says: ‘If I sold them, they would end up behind plexiglass somewhere. I mean, if someone offered me a million I would consider it!’