I love Porter Magazine, the in-house online magazine for net-a-porter.com. I loved Porter when it was called The Edit too, and I get what they’re trying to do: create a truly fashion-consumer-based magazine, where you can instantly source (and BUY) the clothing you see modeled by the people within the magazine. Now, all that being said, they did not do their best when they were putting together this Lupita Nyong’o cover. I get that the point is to see what she’s wearing, but they put the “PORTER” banner over her forehead and hair, and in the interview she literally talks about her hair and how important it is to see her natural black hair. It was just a bad editorial call. Anyway, you can see Porter’s Lupita interview here. Some highlights:

On her mother: “I don’t underestimate how much she influenced who I am. I come from a very patriarchal world, but not within my family. My dad listened to my mom. My mom held her own. There was never a sense of her deflecting from my father. She had the power to say no to things, and I saw her hold that power.”

Her hair: “My hair is something that, historically, has been shunned. I mean, how often do you hear, ‘You can’t get a job with hair like that’? Natural, African, kinky hair – it’s often been painted as uncivilized or wild.”

She wrote a children’s book, Sulwe, about being black: “I thought I’d write it over a weekend. I was humbled. It took two years…. It was about having dark skin in a world that favors traditional Western standards of beauty – light complexions and silky hair – and my own journey from insecurity to a place of self-acceptance.”

After she won an Oscar for ‘12 Years a Slave’: “I got so many offers for slave roles. I didn’t want to do any of them. I did not want to be pigeon-holed… I had to reacquaint myself with the possibility of failure and be OK with it. And I had to free myself from needing to maintain an ‘A’ because it wasn’t in the pursuit of an ‘A’ that I got to that point. When I did 12 Years I was not expecting accolades, I was just trying to play Patsey to the best of my abilities. So I kept reminding myself of the thing that I needed to invest my time in – my craft. And that’s why I did Star Wars [The Force Awakens].”

Working on Black Panther: “We’d never seen something like this. We knew it was going to be dope. But we could not have predicted just how clamorous and passionate the response would be. There was just an ownership! People grabbed that film and ran with it: paying for strangers to go see the film; dressing up for the cinema; embracing their culture, and not just African culture. In South Korea, all the interviewers for our press junket came dressed in their national garb from all around Asia.” The discourse the film began between Africans and African-Americans, she says, has also been thrilling. “I was in Nigeria not long after the film came out,” she says, “and one man said to me, ‘How are my cousins, Boseman and Jordan?’” (As in her co-stars – Chadwick Boseman and Michael B. Jordan.) “I had never heard that sentiment come out of an African’s mouth. It started a long overdue conversation about our shared identities.”

[From Porter]

The whole interview is a nice read, but she’s not really saying anything new, except for the stuff about the children’s book, which I didn’t know. Porter talked with Lupita at length about the diversity of beauty, black hair and acceptance and embrace of her natural hair. Which makes me wonder again, what in the world were they thinking when they threw the banner over half her head, like they didn’t want people to really look at her hair. It’s a shame. But they did give her a second cover (see below) which is nice.

Covers courtesy of Porter.