By Arushi Jacob
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Tina Knowles has worked as a businesswoman, fashion designer, and hairstylist, but the job she’s proudest of is her role as “Matriarch,” which is also the apt title of her 2025 autobiography. At Variety’s Entertainment Marketing Summit presented by Deloitte, Knowles and Variety’s Senior Entertainment Writer Angelique Jackson dove into her history and talked about what inspired her business decisions and collaborating with her family, including her daughter Beyoncé. When she was freshly divorced, Knowles began chronicling her life as a personal project. She credited writing the book with helping her navigate her insecurities and grief over the relationship ending. “I was 59 years old, which is really funny, because I’m 72 now and that’s not old, but back at 59 I was like, ‘Oh my God, my life is over,’” said Knowles. “I started recording into my telephone, not for a book, but to leave it to my kids, because I felt my mortality. If I die, my children wouldn’t know anything about their history, because they are just not very interested in it. I would try to tell them stories, and they wouldn’t listen. So, I was like, they’re gonna be real sorry one day.” “Matriarch” also reflected on Knowles’ career trajectory, with Knowles noting she often worked out of necessity and didn’t receive proper credit for her contributions. Knowles says she has finally learned to take credit for her achievements, including her House of Deréon clothing line with Beyoncé, and previous work designing costumes for Destiny’s Child, something the band’s label was not happy with. “They were constantly trying to get rid of me,” said Knowles, who explains the label often saw her costumes as “country.” “Some of them, I look back on [and] I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, but a lot of them were amazing, and it set them apart. I think that was a big part of what made them special and different, aside from the talent, because they were super talented, and I’m not taking away from that, but the imaging had a lot to do with it. Sometimes I get sad about it, because I look back at pictures and I’m like, that was really good. But the record label was constantly tearing it down and saying, ‘They need to look like Britney Spears, and they need to have on a midriff top and some jeans.’ They even tried to get rid of me a couple of times, which didn’t work, thank God.”
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