“Michael Benabib Mary J. Blige Brooklyn, 1992... Before Mary J. Blige became the 'Queen of Hip-Hop Soul,’ she was a girl from around the way. With her baseball hat to the back and Timberlands, the young singer from Yonkers’ Schlobohm housing projects would come to redefine not only the fusion of hip-hop and R&B but also urban style for women. Blige, along with Sean “Diddy" Comes and some other visionary stylists, were instrumental in the creation of her game-changing style.
‘This was on the set of her music video for her single ‘You Don’t Have to Worry,’ directed by F. Gary Gray. Some of the images were used for the cover of the remixed version of What’s the 411? Puffy did the remix, which meant this was going to be played in the clubs, so I wanted to make sure the photos I got really captured what Mary was all about. In the frames, you can see Puff next to one of Mary’s dancers and Mary on top of the Jeep, which belonged to the stylist Sybil Pennix. Sybil was initially Puffy’s assistant at Uptown records but then moved into creating and styling Mary’s look, which of course included the baseball jerseys and the hoop earrings. The hoops were real b-girl, which she wears to this day. I shot on slide transparencies because the turnaround was so quick. Puffy hadn’t started Bad Boy Entertainment at this time, he was still working with Andrew Harrell at Uptown Records, but he was already a force of nature. He was instrument in making Mary a star.’" -excerpt from Contact High (p.93)
