Ciara always tries to wear something personal for her, and here, it’s the ATL hat. “That’s my armor. You can’t take the ATL out of me, that’s the city that made me,” she affirms. Also, as a military baby, she wears her cargos like a badge of honor. “The cargos make the booty bounce a little better,” she adds wickedly.

Next up, 2005’s music video for “Oh,” where she wears a baby blue and orange crop top. “Crop tops were new for me!” she says. “It was so much color and life happening in this video..I pushed the attitude meter up in this visual, and that was with everything.” That attitude switch-up brought Ciara into a new style era: daring crop tops, eye-shading hoodies. “You would stop the camera if the hoodie placement wasn’t right,” she says, very seriously.

Another new frontier for Ciara’s style? Wigs. And that came with the 2005 BET Awards. As well as a flowing printed Cavalli skirt with a chunky bedazzled belt, a suite of bangles, and a classic white tank top, Ciara wore a long, toffee blonde wig. “I was on those laces before the laces was a lace,” she laughs. Wearing a skirt was also new for the artist, who was most comfortable in track pants. Slowly, things were getting cuter and more feminine.

That more sensual, sexy sense of style was captured on stage at the VMAs in 2005, where we see her onstage in a black mini dress with knee-high black boots beside Missy Elliott, who is dressed in contrasting all-white—here, they won big for the iconic “Lose Control” music video.

The 2006 Grammys took things up a notch again, with Ciara wearing a white chiffon-layered Dolce & Gabbana dress. It was her second time. “I’d never worn a dress like this in my life, and I feel like on nights that are rare, you gotta be rare,” she says. “I like this girl, I like when I look at her I can see this evolution in me at that time.”

2009’s “Like A Boy” music video saw Ciara get to play with both the masculine and feminine aspects of her style. “I remember someone on set telling me I needed to be more sexy, and to me, the sexy was dressing like a boy,” she says. Experimenting with the double standards she sings about, Ciara dresses in both a sexy white pleated mini-dress and sharp suiting. Working with director Diane Martel was a turning point. “She knew how to help me speak to the world how I wanted to visually,” says Ciara.