Rihanna Talks Fenty, That Long-Awaited Album, and President *****
BY ABBY AGUIRRE
RIHANNA is ready. First she moved our interview from Thursday to Wednesday. Then from evening to afternoon. When I get word of this latest change, on a slick and humid August day in Los Angeles, I have just enough time to shower and get to the Hotel Bel-Air.
Waiting for Rihanna is practically a journalistic genre all its own. That the Barbadian superstar is now running ahead of schedule seems evidence of her new life as global fashion mogul. Only three and a half years have passed since she presented her first
Fenty x Puma collection at New York Fashion Week, a vision of gothleisure delivered to a clamoring world (“if the Addams Family went to the gym” was how she put it). At the time, design was something she was trying on; over the following year, Puma’s profits rose by 92 percent.
Since then the 31-year-old has done nothing less than upend the beauty and lingerie industries. In 2017 Fenty Beauty introduced 40 shades of foundation in a business where a dozen was the norm—making a reported $100 million in the first 40 days and nearly $600 million in the first year. Dior, CoverGirl, and Revlon quickly followed, establishing a 40-shade standard now known as “the Fenty effect.” (Rihanna upped the ante again this summer with a hydrating foundation in 50 shades, writing on Instagram, “When the foundation takeova ain’t ova!”) In 2018 she unveiled Savage X Fenty, an intimates line available in many sizes and shades of “nude.” (The brand just secured a reported $50 million in new funding.)
Now Rihanna is reimagining fashion at the highest levels. Fenty maison, the Paris-based line she founded with
LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton and announced this spring, makes Rihanna the first woman to create a brand for LVMH and the first black woman to lead a major luxury fashion house. According to
Forbes, it has also made her the wealthiest female musician in the world.
At the Bel-Air, a hostess shows me to a small courtyard table tucked behind the trunk of a century-old sycamore. I’m sitting under its dappled canopy when Rihanna arrives. She sweeps in quietly, enveloping the area and probably the swans outside in an invisible cloud of her famous scent—an intoxicating olfactory assault that, in the words of Lil
Nas X, “literally smells like heaven.” (The internet has decided it’s a Kilian fragrance called Love, Don’t Be Shy, which contains notes of neroli, orange blossom, and marshmallow.) We order Champagne.
It’s safe to assume Rihanna is wearing makeup—her own Killawatt highlighter and Stunna lip paint, perhaps—but I can’t say for sure, because her face is a radiant palette of natural tones. Her hair, dark and long, is pulled back in a half ponytail. I know from experience that a regular person can effectively black out in Rihanna’s presence, so insanely disarming is her charisma. (Even Seth Meyers runs this risk. “The two days I wish I could remember everything about are my wedding day,” he tells me. “And the day I spent day-drinking with Rihanna.”) So I make a point to write down what she’s wearing: denim blazer (Fenty), green slacks, strappy sandals (Bottega Veneta). In her right hand, the one with the henna-style tattoo, she is clutching futuristic masklike sunglasses whose lenses are glacier-blue (also Fenty).
Normally I bring a list of questions, but I didn’t have time to prepare one, which I make a split-second decision to confess. “I’m winging it, so you have to help me,” I say nervously. Rihanna flashes a grin that is somehow both reassuring and mischievous. “Aren’t we all?” she says.
RIHANNA’S VISION OF LUXURY fashion is something like Rihanna—aesthetically capricious, casually category-busting, impossibly cool. This is because she made a rule from the outset that she had to love and want to wear all of
Fenty maison herself. The fashion, as she puts it, had to be honest. “I’m not the face of my brand, but I am the muse, and my DNA has to run all the way through it,” she says. “I don’t want anyone to pull up my website and think, Rihanna would never wear that.”
Most of the time, her website is the only place you can buy Fenty maison. (She has occasional pop-ups.) Rihanna decided to abandon the old luxury distribution model in favor of a Supreme-like “drop” strategy and direct-to-consumer online sales. This is because when Rihanna sees something she likes—which at the moment includes a lot of Balenciaga, which is getting on her nerves and giving her designer envy—she wants it now. Not in six months.
Rihanna does not want to buy winter coats in August.
Fenty was different out of the gate. Its first collection, released in May, offered sculptural suits and minidresses with power shoulders and snatched waists—the work of a sure hand, rendered with Caribbean flair. But the clothes told a larger story, one that linked Afrocentric fashion, black nationalism, and the Caribbean diaspora—paying homage, in particular, to Kwame Brathwaite, the documentary photographer and pillar of midcentury Harlem’s Black Is Beautiful movement. Fenty posted original Brathwaite images on its website and social feeds—one showed three Grandassa models in front of a banner that said, buy black—and noted that the documentarian, born in Brooklyn to Bajan parents, shares a similar surname with Rihanna’s maternal family. (Brathwaite, now 81, gave Rihanna his blessing.)
The second drop, released in June (the drops are monthly, for the most part), continued these themes with lightweight, body-con skirts and dresses in tangerine and teal—all photographed by Rihanna herself. “Tie-and-dye” scarves and wraps came in bright island hues. Oversize T-shirts bore graphics from vintage postcards and tourist brochures once stocked in Barbados hotels. (THE HOTTEST WELCOME IN THE CARIBBEAN, one said.) A more traditional fashion house would’ve called this resortwear. Fenty described it as “intended for escape.”
The monthly releases are tonally idiosyncratic because—well, Rihanna’s style isn’t one thing. “It can be tomboy one day,” she explains. “It can be a gown the next. A skirt. A swimsuit.” If it all feels like an improvisation, that’s because Rihanna never planned any of this. Yes, she already had a relationship with LVMH. (Its beauty incubator, Kendo, backs Fenty Beauty.) But she never expected the chairman and chief executive, Bernard Arnault, to invite her to create a fashion house from scratch. “I just thought, Really? Is he sure? Like, now?” she remembers. “And then you’re left with this opportunity that’s a really big risk for everyone involved. But I’ve never been afraid to take risks. That’s the thing that got me out of my own way. I was like:
You’ve never been afraid to do anything or try anything, regardless of the outcome. So I accepted, and we went full steam ahead.”
It took a year just to build the team (current head count: 44) and lay down the broad strokes. There were conceptual hurdles, such as: How do you translate Rihanna’s singularly diverse style into a coherent brand? A breakthrough came after a design meeting in Paris, says Jahleel Weaver, Fenty maison’s style director. Weaver recalls that he and Rihanna were having a postmortem when “really casually, not even making eye contact, she said, ‘It’s kind of all over the place. But I get it ’cause I’m all over the place.’ ” Something clicked. The design team had been trying to limit itself to one aspect of Rihanna—but there were so
many Rihannas. “That’s exactly what we should be embracing,” Weaver recalls thinking. Every woman isn’t Rihanna, but many women relate to her all-over-the-place-ness. “She
is fearless, but she is also a businesswoman. She’s a girlfriend. She’s a friend. She’s all of these things.”
If the cross-section of celebrities taking to Fenty means anything, the whimsy is working.
Bella Hadid wore Fenty’s white denim corset dress and lime-green heels the day of the CFDA Awards. The Bollywood actress Sonam Kapoor was spotted in Fenty’s oversize salmon-pink suit and matching fanny pack in Mumbai. Tracee Ellis Ross wore the same salmon power suit to a press appearance for ABC’s
Mixed-ish, the new spinoff of
Black-ish. (“It made me feel like a boss with a secret,” Ross says. “Powerful, luxurious, bold.”)
Fenty maison has been celebrated in Paris, where more women have ascended to top fashion posts of late. Maria Grazia Chiuri, the first woman to lead Christian Dior, says that Fenty is “proposing a new and extremely modern approach to contemporary fashion.” Rihanna’s decision to be her own muse, Chiuri adds, “speaks to the increasing need for women to be in charge of their appearance, their bodies, and their lives.”
All of this empire-building across industries and continents raises an obvious question: Does she still have time to record music? Rihanna hasn’t released a new album since Anti, her irreverent, digressive, and ultimately irresistible slow-burner—and that was nearly 44 months ago. “I have been trying to get back into the studio,” she says, sounding as close to sheepish as Rihanna is capable of sounding. “It’s not like I can lock myself in for an extended amount of time, like I had the luxury of doing before. I know I have some very unhappy fans who don’t understand the inside bits of how it works.”
She’s not kidding. Rihanna’s Navy—among the fiercest fan bases in the stan universe—has been known to respond to Rihanna’s beauty and fashion launches with a fleet of impatient, ornery comments. Occasionally, much to the delight of the internet, she claps back. One fan commented on a post about Fenty Beauty’s Sun Stalk’r Instant Warmth Bronzer: “Ok now can you please go back to singing.” Rihanna replied: “I love how y’all tell me what to do.” “Annoyed,” another fan wrote. “We want the album sis.” Rihanna: “Well this is bronzer.” (Rihanna then trolled the Navy with a T-shirt released in Fenty’s second drop—it had a dragon on the front and, on the back, the words NO MORE MUSIC.)
By “the album,” fans mean the reggae record Rihanna confirmed she was making more than a year ago:
R9, as the Navy has labeled it. (It will be Rihanna’s ninth.) So, is
R9 still a reggae album? “I like to look at it as a reggae-
inspired or reggae-
infused album,” Rihanna says. “It’s not gonna be typical of what you know as reggae. But you’re going to feel the elements in all of the tracks.” I ask why reggae feels right for this moment, and she says, “Reggae
always feels right to me. It’s in my blood. It doesn’t matter how far or long removed I am from that culture, or my environment that I grew up in; it never leaves. It’s always the same high. Even though I’ve explored other genres of music, it was time to go back to something that I haven’t really homed in on completely for a body of work.”
When I ask about a release date, Rihanna’s face morphs into a grimace, equal parts amusement and terror. “No, oh my God, they’re gonna
kill you for that!” she exclaims. “And they’re going to kill me more!” It is so strange to see
@badgalriri exhibit any sort of emotion categorizable as fear that for a moment I have no clue who she’s talking about. Wait—
Vogue? Your record company? The international reggae police? “I’m talking the
Navy—my scary fans,” Rihanna clarifies. “But they’ve earned it,” she is quick to add. “They got me here.”
Does any part of Rihanna foresee a day when she might decide that, in fact, there will be no more music? “Oh,
nooo,” she says. “Music is, like, speaking in code to the world, where they get it. It’s the weird language that connects me to them. Me the designer, me the woman who creates makeup and lingerie—it all started with music. It was my first pen pal–ship to the world. To cut that off is to cut my communication off. All of these other things flourish on top of that foundation.”
A FEW WEEKS LATER, Rihanna detonated at New York Fashion Week with a
Savage X Fenty spectacular at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, an arena she last played during the
Antitour. The lights rose over a sparse set that resembled the Roman Colosseum as Rihanna stood statue-like on a pedestal in the middle of a reflecting pool, wearing a sheer black body stocking, a velvet miniskirt, and witchy heels. To an industrial remix of “Woo,” the menacing sixth track off
Anti, she gyrated alongside 10 other dancers, then disappeared.
For the next 40 minutes, models and dancers strutted and twerked their way through a candy-colored lingerie extravaganza—part runway presentation, part music festival. Gigi Hadid sauntered out in a black bustier and veil as Big Sean performed “Clique,” followed by Bella Hadid, Cara Delevingne, A$AP Ferg, Migos, and DJ Khaled. Joan Smalls walked arm in arm with 21 Savage. Normani led a dance crew in a lip-emblazoned bra-and-panty set. When Laverne Cox performed high kicks in a neon-pink bodysuit, she drew an ecstatic standing ovation.
The show set a new bar for fashion spectacle. (
Amazon later streamed it to more than 200 countries.) It also offered the most electric articulation of the Fenty ethos yet—an idea that has more to do with freedom than aspiration. Jennifer Rosales, who oversees Fenty’s beauty and lingerie operations, puts it this way: “She’s not telling everyone to be like her. She’s telling everyone, ‘You can feel this good too. You just gotta do you.’ ”
With Savage X Fenty, Rihanna hasn’t just proclaimed 42H bras and 3X undies sexy. She’s changed the idea of whom women should be wearing lingerie for (themselves). Likewise, Fenty Beauty didn’t just prove the existence of a massive, and massively ignored, market. It told women of all complexions that they, too, belonged in the category of beauty. That’s why Fenty’s social feeds were flooded with comments and queries from around the world. From Nigeria, from Malaysia, from Ecuador. “Finally a collection that has the chocolate of chocolate!” one woman wrote. A woman with albinism posted a photo of her face next to a bottle of fair foundation. “Rethinking all the times I ended up orange,” she wrote. “It’s a new world.”
Rihanna’s philanthropy is part of this new world, too. Both Savage X Fenty and Fenty Beauty support the Clara Lionel Foundation, the nonprofit she founded in 2012 (named after her late grandmother Clara Braithwaite, and her 90-year-old grandfather Lionel) to fund education and emergency--response programs, mostly in the Caribbean. Recently the foundation has added climate resilience to its priorities, with a focus on women’s health. When Rihanna’s foundation toured Puerto Rico a year after Hurricane Maria, they noticed health clinics were still closed. Unwanted pregnancies, pregnancy complications, and HIV rates spike after natural disasters. “So we’re taking a look at the harsh reality of what happens after these events,” explains Justine Lucas, the foundation’s executive director, “and thinking about how we can support women in a real, tangible way.”
In trying to describe the way Rihanna’s personality radiates, its global reach, the world tends to use the word
real. Mary J. Blige, realest of the real, does too when I ask why she chose Rihanna to present her with BET’s lifetime-achievement award this year. “Rihanna is the truth,” Blige says. “Real and true to the game.” But for this chapter of Rihanna’s life, we may also need a new word for
power.
There is real-world power, the kind sought and wielded by the sort of people Robert Caro studies. There is personal power, that admirable mix of self-knowledge, self-governance, and self-respect we call autonomy. And there is the more mysterious kind—the power to move masses, be it through spiritual teachings or a pop song on the order of “Like a Prayer.” But there is no term for when all three are rolled into one.
Blige comes closest, I think, when she tells me that Rihanna has a rare and special combination of courage, humility, and heart: “A lot of people
have it, but a lot of people don’t have
it. Rihanna has
it.”
IF YOU'VE EVER WONDERED what
@badgalriri’s childhood report cards looked like, you can soon seek answers in
RIHANNA, a gigantic photo book due out from Phaidon this fall. Here’s an excerpt, which you should picture on mint-green paper, in the exemplary penmanship of Robyn Fenty’s grade school teacher back in St. Michael Parish:
Is sure of herself and displays a positive attitude. Is friendly and takes a leading role in group activities. Is very alert and observant of her environment. Expresses her ideas clearly and intelligently. Is very relaxed in acting out her ideas. Movement is well coordinated. Enjoys rhythms & singing. Is beginning to show shape and form in her drawing.