One of her missions has been to subvert the usual luxury fashion model, and to “drop” new pieces directly to consumers on the Fenty website, rather than waiting six months from catwalk to sale. “I’m working like this now so that I don’t have to in the future.”Dawn is approaching now, and I begin to grasp that I have spent the night with a woman who is honest – with the world and with herself. Young Hollywood?
She looks like a woman who has mastered living in her own skin, who has nothing to hide.Many of the messages are wishing her a happy birthday – the week before we meet, she turned 32. Its style blends Barbados, Brooklyn, Brixton and Bel Air, and somehow makes everything feel disruptive, an effect greater than the sum of its collective knit-dress or parachute-boot parts.
It can feel overwhelming at times, and I worry deeply for the mental health impact on everyone, as well as the physical one.
For this month’s shoot, she wanted “Rihanna for a new decade.” We worked through a substantial archive of visual references (her fashion and cultural knowledge is encyclopaedic) to find a new proposition.
As we speak, she is poised to release a long anticipated new album, to cement the success of her new luxury fashion house Fenty Maison (the first female-fronted LVMH brand created from scratch), to mark the continued ascendance of her lingerie brand Savage x Fenty and make-up industry game-changer Fenty Beauty, which is imminently expanding into skincare.For the last three years, Rihanna has mostly lived in London, where she says she loves to record music and generally create. “It is so easy to put something together for a runway, because you have six months to perfect it in production. As we wait for Rihanna to arrive – which, in line with her notorious timekeeping, takes a good few hours – he shows me round the Roc Nation war room. British Vogue reminded us of this on Monday afternoon when it revealed its new May issue double cover starring none other than Rihanna.
In her ears are simple diamond studs, her hair in asymmetric cornrows, with one sweeping elegantly away from her face. You put so much on your plate. As she accepted the President’s Award, previous recipients of which include Muhammad Ali, she issued a powerful demand.Perhaps it’s because there is as much a political message as there is a fashion mission behind Fenty Maison that the designer feels her bar for quality must be set unambiguously high. We all have a keen sense that we are living through history and, rightly, life can often feel filled with fear. That was my house.”Rihanna is, she believes, at the beginning of a new era, conscious of a new decade and her own proliferating identities. Don’t you have other artists?
Rihanna's (once again) breaking barriers on the cover of a fashion mag. It doesn’t feel like tokenism when Rihanna does it.
On the cover of British Vogue’s May issue, Rihanna wears a face tattoo spelling out the word “Truth”.
I write all of the copy for the websites, the product descriptions, product names, the colour names…” she confirms.
There’s just good music, and if I feel it, I’m putting it out.” Does that mean that, contrary to reports, it’s not going to be a reggae album, I ask, trying to hide my disappointment. The things that I refuse to stay silent on, these are things that I genuinely believe in.”“Not my mother, my mother was legal,” she is careful to clarify, “but let’s just say I know what that fight looks like. “Then it turns into disappointment that this is groundbreaking right now. It’s so much more challenging to create something in a short amount of time and it be perfect.”It’s the first sense I get in person that Rihanna’s gentle manner belies a steeliness, a sense not of her brand or a strategy to impress but of the values that actually make her tick. It’s now close to 4am, and whether it’s her Fenty Match Stix concealer, or her famous energy levels, she shows no signs of fatigue. “I felt connected to it, and knowing why really made me feel like there’s no way I can ignore this.”I am sitting on an expansive sofa in the Hollywood office of Roc Nation’s co-founder Jay Brown, drinking one of his fine bottles of red wine, a 1998 Châteauneuf-du-Pape. “I’d rather go to Brixton,” she laughs. Editor-in-Chief Edward Enninful styled the shoot while Steven Klein photographed the editorial.
“Er, no,” she says, as if that’s a stupid question. I’ve been in it. Rihanna covers the May 2020 issue of British Vogue. So I know how disheartening it is for a child – and if that was my parent that was getting dragged out of my house, I can guarantee you that my life would have been a shambles.”Next up, the launch of her full skincare line, Fenty Skin.
As part of the styling, I was keen to dismantle the set of codes that have been prescribed for womanhood for too long. Read more: British Vogue’s May Issue Will Be Offered Online For Free Take this month’s cover star Robyn Rihanna Fenty. Imagine the wall-mounted terminals financial traders use to gauge the markets, only this is the market of Riri.
It felt like an important shift.What I love about Rih is that it’s always new territory, which is thrilling – not to mention a huge task. But Rihanna says she has had to push herself to achieve the same level of perfection.
“The Guyanese are like the Mexicans of Barbados,” she says.