Everyone is waiting for Rihanna. Yes, to release an album and to make some headline-inspiring paparazzi walk, but also to turn up at her own event. Last night, the musician-turned-mogul was no fewer than five hours late to the Tobacco Dock launch of Fenty X Puma’s latest release: an earthen brown creeper shoe. (This is, of course, the same woman who arrived at the 2023 Met Gala after an actual cockroach, and who schedules her cover interviews to take place at 3:26am.)
And yet this is precisely the kind of megawatt behaviour you expect – indeed, want – from Rihanna, who is one of the few celebrities capable of leaving a phalanx of British press willingly withering beneath floodlights. (If religion has taught mankind anything, it is to suffer for your heroes.) But there might also have been a more legitimate reason for Rihanna’s delayed arrival, beyond operating in her own time zone. “I love making music in London,” she told Vogue on last night’s red carpet. “That’s my favourite thing to do here. It’s weird but I feel like London allows me to invite rediscoveries in myself, like I could do anything. There are no boundaries. I don’t know why, but I’ve always made the best music here, or at least decided what the direction is gonna be for my albums.”
When I ask Rihanna – who is dressed in some outsized tailoring in the same kaolin shade of the Phatty creepers she is here to promote – whether she regrets anything she’s worn on the red carpet, she experiences a sudden jolt of déjà vu. “Why would you put me on the spot like this!” she demands, raising a Balmain Jolie Madame to her face and stifling an awkward laugh. “But, oh my God, it was something similar to this, which is kind of ironic. It was a brown tan suit that we all loved so much, but the day we put it on I was like, ‘Mmm, it’s giving UPS driver,’ and that is not cute. Not for the red carpet anyways.”
Given that creepers are a cornerstone of emo culture, might Rihanna now be plotting an alt-girl aesthetic, in the tradition of just about every other famous person in 2024? “I’m a Pisces,” she says, with an emphatic glance. “We’re always gonna be emo, that literally is the definition of our zodiac sign. I like to put my foot down, draw my boundaries, but I also like to have fun. I like juxtaposition.”
To absolutely no one’s surprise, Rihanna considers the Guo Pei gown she wore to the 2015 Met Gala to be among her proudest fashion accomplishments. “Nobody will ever forget that and I will never forget the feeling of discovering that designer based off of the design challenge that Anna gave me,” she says. “And damn! You know what, no one would ever expect this, but there’s also the Stella McCartney crop top and skirt, and the party dress that she made me for that same [Met Gala] with my little ass crack out.”
Even less surprising, when it comes to her look for the upcoming 2024 Met Gala, Rihanna says: “I’m gonna wear Fenty something! Fenty Beauty, Fenty Skin, Fenty Savage…” It will, however, be demure. “I’ve done so much sh** in my life. I’ve had my nipples out, my panties out. But now, those are the things which, I guess as a mum and an evolved young lady – emphasis on young – there are things I feel like I would never do. Like, ‘Oh my God, I really did that? Nips out?’”
