All The Flowers for Angela Yee

When Angela Yee appearance on the cover of ALPHA Magazine marks a significant convergence, a meeting point between two media eras, two platforms of influence, and two builders who understand both legacy systems and the future architecture of culture.

For Luciano Layne, ALPHA’s editor-in-chief, the decision was intuitive. “You’ve given so many flowers to so many people,” he told Yee. “I felt like it was time for you to have yours.” But the gesture also functioned as something larger; a collaboration between a radio institution and a new-media publisher reshaping how visibility is distributed.

After years of interning in various marketing and management roles under Shade 45 and WuTang, Yee’s work ethic and professionalism was on full display after her breakout interview with Jay-Z in 2004 which helped her to solidify a role at SiriusXM radio.

Yee’s career has been defined by two powerful decades in radio, interviews that shaped narratives, and conversations that broke artists and defined public perception, most notably during her time at Power 105.1 alongside DJ Envy and Charlamagne Tha God.

Layne comes from the opposite direction—new media, multi-hyphenate creativity, and platform-building outside traditional institutional pipelines. Before Alpha, he moved through music, ghostwriting, photography, and talent management, learning the mechanics of visibility from the margins. The magazine emerged not just as a fashion title, but as a corrective system—a way to place Black culture-makers into legacy visual spaces while retaining the ethos of independent media.

“When people hear the name, ALPHA, they think masculine,” Layne said. “But it’s really a mindset. It’s an act of service.” His goal was radical in its simplicity: to see Black people occupying the same newsstands and cultural real estate as mainstream legacy publications. “Why don’t we deserve to be on the covers with the Hillary Swanks and everybody else?”

Yee’s cover sits at that intersection. A radio veteran stepping into a fashion-forward, culturally insurgent magazine. A legacy medium meeting a digital-first platform that still believes in print as artifact and archive. The collaboration is symbolic: old media and new media not competing, but co-authoring the narrative.

The standout ALPHA covers—Rick Ross, Deborah Cox, and now Yee—function as visual archives. But, Layne is equally focused on the experience behind the imagery. He credits the magazine’s organic growth to intentionality rather than marketing spend. “We tapped into creating a really good experience for them,” he said. “Every single cover we worked with, 90 percent of them reposted it. They consistently reposted it.”