00:18I'm Moana Lu, I'm the Chief Content Creative Officer for Essence.
00:22This is my first September cover, so it's quite a big deal.
00:27So right away we were thinking, okay, we need Serena.
00:30But we need more than just Serena, we want to tell a story.
00:34And we did fall in love with the work of Len Lu.
00:37And I was like, okay, we're going to combine Len Lu and Serena and tell a story.
00:45Working with Serena Williams was really amazing.
00:47She's inspired a lot of us, you know, in Nigeria and Africa, looking at her like, yeah, you can also
00:51do great things.
00:52Looking at her story and what she'll be able to achieve, the fact that she's living with young black people
00:57coming after her.
01:02So what you saw on the paint, I call it sacred out of the ori.
01:05Ori meaning your essence.
01:07This Nigerian print that we put on our face, on our body, in the background, it's tribal, but it's modern.
01:15Yeah, it was an amazing opportunity. First, I'm so, so, so super excited.
01:22We want to feel the global community that we have. And this is the story around these amazing cover shoots.
01:30Serena is a joy to work with. She's really free, really simple.
01:34The experience that we had today on this set was remarkable because the intricateness of the braid, the softness.
01:39She loves color and pinks and purples are her favorite color. So she has everything she wants in this cover.
01:49Black women are a piece of art and that's the way that we're treating this cover.
01:53So it's a piece of art and I really hope that people will understand.
02:11We're not looking for datos and jumping on.
02:14Well, we're not looking for datos and nothing at all here.
02:15Of course, you can play with um, and we feel more than X.
02:15And we can even snap them out that we're doing similar to the side.
02:17Thank you very soon as we see the
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