We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Zoe Bates. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Zoe below.
Zoe, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
Out of all the questions that people ask me about my recreations and photos, the first one is the most frequently asked that many people often press me about—and it is usually the broadest question that I hear as I get asked about the wonders from how I edit my photos to how I find the exact pieces of clothing that match the original look that I pay homage to, to how I always seem to manage to get the right angle that ends up being the perfect shot for my version and to even how I start with doing the recreations that I have been doing.
Truthfully, when starting back to the basics, I learned how to use Photoshop and edit photos by having an Eminem fan page I created on Instagram a little over ten years ago in my adolescent years. When I first started the account, I would typically share regular content and information like any other dedicated fanatic—keep in mind, this was Instagram ten years ago, where videos were still around fifteen seconds to a minute, and the app was solely made for sharing photos out of endless fun. Of course, I connected with other fans within the fandom community. Some of my mutual friends, who also ran similar accounts, would stylize their pages by creating their own original content about Eminem through memes, collages, video edits, photoshop edits, and graphic design pieces—which was the first time that I ever came seeing them, and how users and creators utilized social media platforms as a way to share their work and to share their love for their niche interest. Many users on my feed and homepage would often repost the edited works of other creatives, especially from social media sites like Tumblr, which seemed like the haven of Photoshop and graphic design.
It utterly fascinated me how some people could fluidly manipulate photos, text, and graphic effects to make an entirely different piece of an image. One day, I enticed myself enough to try and give it a go to see what I could create on my behalf—even though I didn’t know a single thing that I was doing, no less what I was going to plan on making. I just downloaded this app called Superimpose+—which I still use to this day, in fact—and in a way, I ultimately self-taught myself with knowing how to erase the backgrounds of photos and play around with adjusting the effects of pictures, like their contrast, saturation, and brightness. There wasn’t ever a specific kind of aesthetic or theme that I wanted to make; at first, I began to experiment with basic Photoshop to get a feel for it, and for that, I am gracious for my self-discovery then, as now, it has begun to serve me well with editing photos—and even videos, too!
Knowing what I know now, the one thing I think that I could have done to speed up my learning process was to seek out instructional ways of educating and teaching myself about the ins and outs of Photoshop, like through tutorial videos on YouTube or maybe even reaching out to my peers who created this kind of content and other creatives whom I admired their work. Nowadays, the best way to learn something is to look it up on the Internet, maybe Google some how-to articles, and watch step-by-step tutorials. Yet, I don’t think speeding up my learning process would have been better for me to gather these skills. For something as imaginative and immersive as photos are, you can’t just read or hear about it to grasp it in comprehension and understand what they are. You see it for yourself and what it can all potentially do with how you change the image.
As a predominantly self-driven learner, the skills that I think were the most essential were having the patience to take the time to learn how difficult or easy it is to edit a photo so far out that it does not look appealing and having faith in myself that if I wanted to learn how to make all these Photoshop edits that everyone else does on Tumblr, then I could, as long as I kept trying and made an effort to become familiar with it all.
Although I have improved over time, I am not a professional graphic designer or a software editor and most likely will not aspire to become one in my life. I know the photo editor and Photoshop apps that work best for me, and I will use those I am familiar with. I know what I know about image editing, and I will not overexert myself in trying to learn something that will frustrate me or, most importantly, use software that will not help me reach the recreation that I am trying to pay homage to the original. I guess you could say that it is my ignorance, or the lack of proper education for lack thereof, to the study of photo editing that stands in the way of learning more. I have never used Adobe Photoshop for my recreations, and I am unsure if I will use it regularly as the entire software intimidates me a bit—however, I am open to it. I am loyal to using the same few editing apps I used when I was actively leading my fan page, and I will continue to use them until they are no longer available on the App Store—but I hope that doesn’t ever happen anytime soon. Unlike other artists and creatives, I am much more comfortable with editing on my phone rather than my laptop, which may surprise some. I like to be in control of the visual material I am handling and creating in front of me by using my hands, right with the touch screen as an accessible and easier way to see what I am making.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
In short, I recreate the album art covers of artists, some of whom are my favorite singers and entertainers and others I may not even listen to regularly.
I don’t necessarily consider this a form of cosplay, as cosplay is more of a practice of dressing up as a fictional character from a movie, book, or video game. I hold this to be more of a recreation, as I am pretty literal in the sense and purpose of creating what was made before again, reproducing and reenacting the original album art that stands in front of me. However, I must say, the person I become by reenacting an album cover in my personalized version is a character within myself, as I embody a new persona, a new form from what is depicted on an album cover.
That’s also one of the reasons why I like to think of myself as a celebrity chameleon; I bring to play the ability to adapt and transform my appearance to personify the artist I am paying homage to, just like a chameleon, which changes its skin to match and fit its environment.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
For Halloween 2023, my original plan for a costume was to dress up as Doja Cat from her “Juicy” music video, specifically, her red cherry look, which was a look that I always dreamt of recreating for nearly four years in the making. As October approached that year, my plans changed. At the time, Beyonce was embarking on her 2023 Renaissance World Tour, where she would debut a new look seemingly every new show date; of course, it was her custom gold rhinestone Loewe bodysuit, reminiscent of the Birth of Venus that she wore for the performance of “HEATED” – which also happens to be one of my all-time favorites songs by her—that also spoke to me creatively as Halloween was coming up. I wanted nothing more than to embody that look. That led me to, now, two different Halloween costumes.
Moreover, my college friend group wanted to do a group Halloween look that year. As the Barbie movie was also released in theaters earlier that summer, we, nonetheless, were inspired to pick the theme for our costumes as Barbie, where we would dress up as characters from the animated cinematic universe of our personal choice and taste. All of my friends had immediately set their eyes on who they wanted to be right away, but for some reason, I just couldn’t. First, I couldn’t narrow down which Barbie animated movie character spoke to me the most; second, I was also struggling to find the pieces necessary to recreate a detail-to-detail look as intricate and precise as some of the dresses are.
Then, one day, a light bulb went off in my head. I realized that I didn’t have to be precisely Barbie for Halloween, but instead, I could dress up as Ice Spice did in the “Barbie World” music video featuring Nicki Minaj, which was from the Barbie movie soundtrack. Her outfit was simple yet detailed enough that I could find and put all the pieces together with accessibility, with a matching pale pink shrug and skirt and a white bling charm bra created and designed by Laser Kitten, which is a Los Angeles-based fashion brand specializes in 80s, 90s, and Y2K-era up-cycled vintage and creative handmade pieces, just for the music video itself.
When I made my final decision, I went right to work. I found a dupe of the baby pink two-piece skirt set and cut and glued some sequins with the hem of the skirt and the top’s sleeves. I ordered just a plain white bikini top, and I manually cut metal chains all around the straps and the perimeter of the cups; I even ordered a bulk package of random assortments of doll pieces and accessories from Amazon, along with some other decorative charms, like dice, and applied them to the top. I think I spent nearly two weeks putting the costume together; at the same time, I was taking twenty credit hours at school and was heavily involved with my extracurricular activities. I worked on that costume during nearly any moment of my free time.
I am a humble person, and I am also an honest person. I killed the look. Period. I dedicated so much time and effort to making it, and it showed. So when my friend helped me with taking photos for my official Halloween post on October 28th, two days before Halloween itself, I was eager to present this costume, out of my three in total, and looked forward to seeing people’s reactions—including Ice Spice’s, if she ever were to see it, as I tagged and mentioned her in my photo.
That next day, Ice Spice liked my post and shared it on her Instagram story.
To this day, I still have the screenshots I took the very second I saw that she liked my photo and reposted it on her story.
I really couldn’t believe it. I remember that exact moment where I was when I came across her username in my notifications, seeing her name with the verified checkmark, that she liked my post – the post of me dressing up as her for Halloween, and that she knew who I was, and that she added it to her Instagram story. Now, I have been beyond grateful and lucky enough to have a few notable names acknowledge my recreations on my account, and I do not take them for granted at all. I have had two members of the R&B and new jack swing girl group, Jade, commenting and thanking me for recreating their 1992 Jade to the Max album cover; Tinashe commending me for recreating her 2019 album Songs For You and its photoshoot; Chris Pérez, the lead guitarist of Selena y Los Dinos and Selena Quintanilla-Pérez’s husband, liking my photo of her for Halloween 2022; and Chlöe, of Chloe x Halle, commenting the smiling face with heart eyes emoji on my recreation of her first debut solo album, In Pieces. Believe it or not, I don’t post my recreations only to get the original creator’s attention. I post my recreations because of the enjoyment and pride that I gain from them. Yet, if I ever catch the attention of the dedicated, it brings me an entirely different meaning and message, and I carry that recognition near and dear to my heart.
The day before Ice Spice noticed the post, I wrote another post on my story explaining how I made the charm bra inspired by Laser Kitten’s original piece. I tagged her and credited her for her work in the music video. Soon enough, Laser Kitten saw my post, thanked me for the recognition, and even followed me afterward.
But then, something else happened, amid all the excitement I was having, and even my friends and followers were feeling, knowing that Ice Spice liked my Halloween costume and shared it.
First, it was one comment about how my body looked. Then, there was another with just laughing face emojis. Then another pointed out my size, specifically, how my stomach looked in the skirt. And another dig about my weight. And a few more, and then some other form of body-shaming, all at once. I was starting to become ambushed with comments regarding my weight, and it seemed that after getting recognized by Ice Spice herself, it was now the proper time to get fat-shamed, as if I should have seen it coming—but, in all honesty, I didn’t. I mean, I have the rhinoceros skin to admit and accept that regardless of where you are on the Internet and what you may come across, you will never be fully protected from cyberbullying, but this was much different than what I expected, more or less, what I could ever imagine. A lot of comments were, in short, unkind—like merciless. Someone told me that instead of Ice Spice, I should have been Lizzo for Halloween, with inference, because I’m fat and fat people should only dress up as other fat people for Halloween. Many said to me that I wasn’t Ice Spice but Rice Spice, and this one became tiring quickly because it was used repeatedly. I was told that I was built like the rapper Tee Grizzley. In my comment section, there were countless GIFs of the fictional character Rasputia from the film Norbit and Dr. Younan Nowzaradan, a vascular and bariatric surgeon widely known for performing weight loss surgery on the TV show My 600-lb Life.
It appeared that it wasn’t that my costume was awful, but it was me. Since I was fat, a plus-size mixed-Black woman, someone who wasn’t the exact body type as Ice Spice, I looked terrible, and therefore, nothing else mattered. So what if I took the precious time out to plan the costume, buying all of my supplies from different craft stores, methodically placing each item in a similar fashion like Laser Kitten’s piece, and missing class so I could find the time to take the photos and dress up for Halloween? So what if, in the last three months, I was in such an immense state of grief that I couldn’t sleep at night and ended up being the most heavily medicated ever in my life so that I could get through each day and still manage to attend college with increased cortisol levels, which was the main reason behind why I recently gained so much weight? So what if making that costume ultimately gave me a sense of joy that I hadn’t felt in a while because of the amount of grief and trauma that I was battling at the time?
It didn’t matter.
None of that mattered to the people who discriminated against me because of my weight. I bet you that if I were a self-proclaimed bigot and complete, downright evil excuse of a person who wasn’t fat or, instead, who was of a size that was seemingly acceptable to their standards, they wouldn’t have attacked me in the way that they did.
This situation, all in all, once again reminded me of the prevalence that exists within the problem of weight discrimination and fatphobia. It is, as a matter of fact, a problem. I once learned in a class about optimizing health and performance in college that weight discrimination is just as common as racial discrimination. Still, in many cases, we overlook the brutality of weight bias and don’t take it seriously because it is socially acceptable.
Of course, I tried to stay my ground and defend myself; without a doubt, I wasn’t going to let anybody on the Internet take away my moment of celebration for Ice Spice liking my costume and posting it to her story, so truthfully speaking, I did reply to quite a few comments in resistance. I didn’t deserve to be treated like that, and I let many of them know it. Yet, that didn’t stop people from commenting more about my weight, and it seemed that more hate kept coming and coming to where I had to get off of my phone so as not to be bombarded with such prejudice. At one point, I even turned off my comments so it would all stop.
However, that didn’t last long. I knew that if I deleted my post in its entirety, everything would be gone—all the support from my friends and followers, the recognition from random people across the Internet, the acknowledgment from the original designer of the outfit, and Ice Spice herself. Even if I deleted the post and the comments found underneath, their impact wouldn’t leave.
To fight back and resist is only to continue to exist, freely and unapologetically, in your regard.
At that moment, I had to tell myself that in the end, it doesn’t matter what people think of my body on the Internet or my costume, as I didn’t dress up for them; I dressed up as Ice Spice and wanted her to see my costume. And she did! Why would she have posted it if she hadn’t thought well of it? And if any of these people were that pressed about my costume, I guess that tells me that perhaps their costumes didn’t turn out that well that year, and they had to cope in some shape.
Ultimately, it also taught me another valuable lesson: confidence is a killer, and it kills for some people to see others who are confident in themselves when, in their minds, they shouldn’t deserve to feel that way.
I aspire to use my force of confidence as a source to inspire others to feel the same way, but if my confidence is upsetting others? Perhaps if I am stirring people up, I am doing many more great things than just one good one.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
I wouldn’t say that a particular goal or mission drives my creative journey, but I think what keeps me most grounded and regardful of my art is the compliment of paying homage to those who have inspired me the most. I am recreating what several artists, creators, entertainers, visionaries, and masterminds have created and dedicated their entire lives to making something that brings people together, something that has been part of my life for so long, where I can’t imagine a life without music for myself. I know that I wholly could never make a body of work like music, but I can demonstrate with the utmost confidence and candor what it means to me and how it has shaped me into the person I am, who I envision myself to be, and how it instills a fiery passion in me like no other.
I wouldn’t be here today without some of these artists and their work. And I mean this in a literal sense. Music has been, at times, the only source of energy that kept the battery life of my existence, my purpose to get through one day and the next, in life going, even on some days when I wasn’t grounded, and I felt like I was in a whole other world, a place that was anywhere but here.
If there is a place that I want to embark on throughout this creative journey, let it be this: wherever this may lead me, for however long I want to pursue this, whether it’s for a few more years or it persists on for the rest of my waking hours, I hope always to remember where my true passions rose from the start, and that I did this because I wanted to, and knew it was made for me. This creative journey is not an experience I have entered; it is a part of me and has always been a part of my creativity as an individual. I finally opened my eyes to meet and bring that vision to life rather than exist solely in my imagination. I gave it meaning, and now, I know what that meaning defines. As I move forward, I will keep doing what I have to do and make sure to do my best.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @zoethehalfrican
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zoe-bates-430323226/
- Other: Email: [email protected]
Image Credits
Image source: Jason Omar Al-Taan
Image source: Ryan Clemens
Image source: Mason Poole
Image source: David LaChapelle
Image source: Albert Watson