Featuring structured silhouettes in subdued neutrals (at least to start) that emphasize strong shoulders, cinched waists and exposed legs, the Fenty brand is hoping to disrupt the market not only by channeling the imagination of a black woman but by revolutionizing the luxury distribution model by focusing on direct-to-consumer online sales. Now, Rihanna has become the first black woman to run a major luxury fashion house.
#RIHANNA WORK MEANING SKIN#
In the last five years, we have witnessed her release her most critically acclaimed album, 4 become creative director of women’s collections for the German sportswear brand Puma, 5 develop a line of size- and gender-inclusive lingerie under the Savage x Fenty label and debut her Fenty Beauty line, 6 which literally changed the face of the cosmetics world by introducing a foundation palette with 40 shades, from the palest to the darkest skin tones. To be black, a woman and an immigrant in the United States is to be a collection of negations of the American dream - yet she stepped past those negations and into a fantasy of abundance few could imagine. I thought about the unenviable position that Rihanna has come to occupy throughout her 14-year career, since she first moved to Stamford, Conn., and released her first tracks in 2005. In April, we agreed to meet among barrels of chocolate at Dark Sugars Cocoa House, 3 in the Shoreditch neighborhood of London. All clothing and accessories are by Fenty,. As she prepares to launch Fenty, the fashion line she has created in partnership with LVMH 2 - the first luxury fashion house the conglomerate has created from scratch (which will begin sales at a pop-up in Paris on May 24, then be fully available at on May 29) - I wanted to discover what lessons she had to offer as she carried that confident otherness deeper into the nonmusical work she has been concentrating on this decade.Ĭorset dress in Japanese denim, $810. But instead of shying from that otherness, she dines upon it, a lesson for any of us who have held onto the shame of difference. When listening to her repetitive, patois-filled song - work, work, work, work, work, work - one hears a Barbados-born 1 musician who recognizes that the histories that are carried in her movement and her tongue are foreign to the listener. This sense of casual immensity is what drew me to Robyn Rihanna Fenty, 31, as not only a performer but as an artist and a businessperson: a model for my own maturation.
The song, which weaves through the dialogue, brought more attention to the play than any other device could have. In my script for “Slave Play,” which debuted at New York Theater Workshop in 2018, the protagonist Kaneisha suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder and Rihanna’s “Work” plays in her head on repeat, taking on a frighteningly oppressive quality and revealing the historic bedrock I was attempting to excavate: namely, that black people, specifically women, must live with the knowledge that their emotional and physical labor is the backbone of every relationship that they endeavor to have with their partners, with America. Then “Work” found its way into my own work. Rihanna seems to be saying in her "Work" lyrics that she is in no position to act judgmental towards him, so perhaps it's time for something deeper.FOR THREE YEARS, I have been a diligent student of Rihanna’s 2016 song “Work.” The first lesson it taught me was in the fine art of ubiquity: The omnipresent earworm hovered over casual intimacies, significant encounters, mundane journeys and made sense of itself wherever, in whatever crevices it chose. In the end, the "Work" lyrics show Rihanna's love once again on her sleeve - or more rightly, all over the net for people to decipher - begging a man who could be Drake not to leave her, but to give Rihanna another chance to love him deeper. You mistaken my love I brought for you for foundationĪll that I wanted from you was to give meīut I wake up and act like nothing's wrong
You took my heart on my sleeve for decoration You took my heart and my keys and my patience