Monáe embraced black-and-white as way to pay tribute to her upbringing. “It’s a dedication to uniformity and I’m a minimalist by heart, but a lot of it had to do with me wanting to have a uniform like the working class, like my mom and my grandmother,” she said in a interview with the Huffington Post . “My grandmother had 16 sisters and brothers and they all had to share one pair of shoes,” she continued. “And so that’s the family that I come from — I don’t ever want to be detached from that. I use it as motivation for my music and to just keep me centered, grounded and to stay on message.”