As the autumn/winter 2024 collections proved—in Prada’s technical cocoon coats and Aaron Esh’s three-quarter-length blazers worn with bootleg GAP hoodies—a static jolt takes place when the street and the salon intersect. Some of Rihanna’s most successful experiments in fashion are the result of screwing with these ladylike aesthetics. Think: two-tone Chanel flats and wide-legged jeans, tweed Gucci jackets and basketball jerseys, pearl necklaces and lingerie, wasp-waisted bar jackets and sideways caps.
This seems to be the musician’s MO at the moment, grabbing just about every classic fashion piece at her disposal. For example, she was last night photographed in New York wearing a diaphanous slip and a leather jacket with a box-like Dior bag named after Diana, Princess of Wales. Originally called the Chouchou, the purse was gifted to Diana by the First Lady of France in September 1995 and “because it suited [her] well”—Diana’s words—it was renamed the Lady Dior 12 months later. In the hands of someone like Rihanna, it sets up a direct bloodline between the cockiness of Paris’s snobbish mesdames and the cockiness of being, well, Rihanna.
MEGA
It helps that she was also papped with a shoal of assistants carrying Goyard shopping bags and boxes of Veuve Clicquot champagne—appropriately named “La Grande Dame”—in the background. (She had bought a few gifts with her to celebrate her brother’s graduation at New York’s Mamo restaurant.) The caption could have read: “Treat me like the businesswoman I am,” an attitude that Rihanna is beginning to lean further and further into.
“I’ve done so much shit in my life,” she said back in April. “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 the young—there are things I would never do again. Like, ‘Oh my God, I really did that? Nips out?’”
This article first appeared on British Vogue.
