Who Is Vic Styles?
As founder and CEO of the online community Black Girls Smoke and its sister-cannabis brand Good Day Flor, acclaimed stylist, influencer with nearly 70k Instagram followers, host of the podcast Kontent Queens, and founder of the cannabis-friendly creative space Cloud Haus, Vic Styles has done it all. After nearly a decade of living in Los Angeles as a celebrity stylist and two years of full-time content creating on the West Coast, Styles moved to Brooklyn in 2019 for a change of pace.
That move, though, was more than just a change of the four walls around her; Styles had transitioned from a legal to legacy market. Something she’d once had unlimited access to in California was now only available behind closed doors in New York: cannabis, a plant she’d been using since she was fifteen.
Styles started smoking, as she says, “During a time in my life that I felt was traumatic. Without me even knowing it, cannabis was obviously calming my anxiety and helping me through depression. But at fifteen, you don’t understand the inner workings of your mind and your emotions, all I knew was I felt better after using cannabis than I did before.”
Shortly after her move to Brooklyn, Styles created Black Girls Smoke and the rest is history.
Black Girls Smoke: Vic Styles’s Community of Cannabis-Smoking Women of Color
Black Girls Smoke (BGS) stemmed from a need for community. After moving across the country, Styles quickly found herself in need of other women with whom to smoke.
Despite beginning as a space for Styles to post her own cannabis smoking content for reasons along the lines of stigmatization of the plant, BGS has evolved into a space that uplifts and underlines the stories that often go unheard in the smoking world: those of women of color.
“I had no intentions of [Black Girls Smoke] becoming a business or becoming my life,” said Styles, laughing, and yet look where it got her: an online page of nearly 50k on Instagram, merch drops, outside submissions, and the start of the “High Girl Community”– here, for a small fee, members are granted exclusive access to industry experts, active job boards, wellness workshops, a guide to finding bud around the country thanks to fellow High Girl Community members, and are the first to access all Black Girl Smoke events online and in-person.
Black Girls Smoke has morphed into a digital space that is actively working to “erase stigmas, color lines, and gender bias in the weed industry,” and does so while highlighting women of color. The site, both in an online blog form and as a social media page, is constantly calling for submissions: personal creative work, someone to help with content creation for BGS, and writing submissions for the blog and the social page.
As BGS evolves, there’s hope to “Expand in a media aspect, tell more stories, really tap into who these women are,” according to Styles. “It’s entirely a different conversation when the story is told from your perspective by your perspective,” states Styles, emphasizing the importance of the stories of women of color being told by other women of color.
BGS IRL: Vic Style's Cloud Haus as Creative Cannabis-Friendly Space in Brooklyn
Only a couple years after her move to Brooklyn and starting Black Girls Smoke, Styles found herself wanting a physical iteration of BGS to come to life.
“As a content creator, there aren’t many spaces where you can smoke and take photos and videos or hold meetings,” explained Styles. And from that, Cloud Haus opened in September 2022. Lovingly described as the “brainchild” of Styles and her partner, Cloud Haus is a space for creative cannabis users to come together and do just that.
Inspired by the aesthetics and vibe of The Wing – a former women-only social club and coworking space shut down in August of 2022 – Styles and her partner “wanted to create a space that was fun and colorful, where people who do consume could come, smoke and create.”
“There are a lot of spaces where cannabis consumers can go, but they don’t always feel welcoming to a certain demographic. Maybe you smoke cannabis but you’re not a smoker; maybe you’re a writer, director, photographer, and you use cannabis but it’s not your life. We created a space for those people,” explained Styles.
Vic has plans to continue expanding her reach, hoping for more stories from women of color to share on Back Girls Smoke, and continuing to curate the space that is Cloud Haus.
For more BGS, visit blackgirlssmoke.com. To learn more about Cloud Haus, visit cloudhausbk.com. To learn more about Good Day Flor, follow @gooddayflor on Instagram.
For more Vic, visit vicstyles.com or @TheVicStyles on Instagram.
A version of this article was originally published in Honeysuckle's 16th print edition. Click here to get your copy now!
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Featured image: Vic Styles, founder and CEO of Black Girls Smoke, Good Day Flor, and Cloud Haus (C) Jayson Paulino / Black Girls Smoke @jaysonpaulino
