Yahoo Lifestyle Rihanna is the people's pop star
It’s just past 4:30 in the morning, and Rihanna lets out a hearty laugh. Settled in a swivel chair in the living room of a dimly lit penthouse suite in a downtown Manhattan hotel, she is telling me about a game she and A$AP Rocky, her partner of five years and the father of her two children, invented at the end of a long road trip they took during the height of Covid. They called it Mickey Mouse, she explains, “because we were like, we’re going to take walks for hours. And every time, we would get these nutcrackers from Harlem, and we would say, ‘Every time we see a rat, we got to take a shot.’ ” She clarifies: “Not a shot. A sip of the nutcracker. That’s like taking a shot or 12.” The drink, a New York City summer specialty consisting of saccharine-sweet fruit juice and high-proof liquor, is so-named because it hits hard.
It is at this moment that Rocky, as Rihanna affectionately calls him, who is fully dressed and curled up asleep on a couch nearby, wakes up, as jazz he’s been playing crescendos in the background. “He put that on for you. He thought you’d like it.” Rihanna is resplendent in a light-blue cutout cashmere sweater from Ferragamo, pinstripe shorts from her own Savage X Fenty line, and flourishes of spiral-set and cushion-cut diamonds on every finger. Her hair, long and black with a center part, is the perfect complement to a face full of expertly applied makeup. “Damn, you heard that from back there? You being nosy,” she chides him in that familiar Bajan lilt.
To be in Rihanna’s world, even for just a couple of hours, is to be completely charmed, disarmed, and welcomed without pretense. She is at once the mononymous cultural force that has given shape to so many indelible moments spanning music, fashion, and beauty over the past 20 years and the person you create fantasy Real Housewives taglines with over a glass of wine. (Hers: “Bajans are crazy. You’re welcome!” in case you were wondering.)
A warm hostess, Rihanna asks me at the start of our interview what I would like to drink. I try to match her energy and ask for whatever she is having, and she graciously tries to anticipate what I might want. She orders us a trio: a glass of water, wine, and an espresso. Her personal assistant places down the drinks and asks if we want anything else. “Mind your business!” she says with a laugh to Fenty Corp vice president Carolyn Girondo as she playfully shoos them away to the bedrooms. All of a sudden, it’s just me and Ri. No publicist looming. No manager eagle-eying the clock to check you don’t go over your allotted time. “I can’t be monitored like that,” she says. “I’ve done that in the earlier years. And I always feel like, ‘Am I giving the right answer? Am I allowed to say this?’ I don’t like that.”
Rihanna offers a sincere apology for the late start. She explains that she and Rocky had taken a trip to the Boys & Girls Club of Harlem that evening, surprising kids with sneakers and clothes from their respective Puma collaborations and posing for photos. “Then we were uptown and Rocky wanted to get food. We went to Melba’s,” she says, referring to the famed Southern soul-food restaurant. “She’s a legend.” Product-naming decisions for upcoming releases for her Fenty Beauty line had to be made before inviting me up to join her. It makes sense that her schedule is packed while most people would be asleep. Such is the life of a mogul and mother of two whose net worth has swollen to $1.4 billion. Arguably, there’s no time for sleep; every minute is big money.
“Should we cheers to this amazing interview that’s going to happen?” Rihanna asks as she sparks up a joint. We clink our wineglasses. “Let’s get into it!” she exclaims. “You know we could talk for hours. You know that you agreed to an hour, but we could be here till 6:00 a.m. if the vibe is right!”
What I find, hours in, is a Rihanna who seems truly at peace. She has plans for the future (yes, that includes new music), but she is also very grounded in the present. She’s landed a major new gig as the new face of Dior’s marquee fragrance, J’adore. “It was very intimidating” to take on the job, Rihanna says. “But I was excited to represent such a historic brand, something that was special to me.” She’s happy to be Rocky’s plus-one at London’s Fashion Awards, where he won the Cultural Innovator Award. “I was there to support Rocky for such an incredible achievement. … It was not my night to wear a gown.” She’s protecting her space and taking time to be a mom. It’s a state of being that feels hard-won. I imagine it is particularly difficult to achieve, given her level of fame and visibility, her growing business empire, and having her two children, RZA (in 2022) and Riot (in 2023), in quick succession.
“Does that feel like where you are?” I ask, picking up on her sense of zen.
“Cheers to clarity,” she says as we toast again. “I think clarity is an evolution in itself. I think people have moments where you have to either get sick of yourself, have something that is completely mind-altering, or come to an understanding of your pain, of your journey. Once you have clarity on something, there’s a new era of your life that’s going to begin. It’s going to be something that you don’t understand, because now you’ve grown; now you’re experiencing new things. And you are not always going to understand what you’re experiencing. You have growing pains. Things are uncomfortable when you’re growing. And the devil always tests you when there’s a reward coming up. It knows the trophy’s right there.”
Robyn Rihanna Fenty released her first single, “Pon de Replay,” in 2005 when she was 17. In a golden year for pop, one dominated by the likes of Mariah, Missy Elliott, and Destiny’s Child, her innate star power shone through. Two decades and multiple eras later, Rihanna has ascended from pop star to superstar. Her endurance is powered by her willingness to dare. She dares to reject what you think a celebrity is meant to represent; she dares to take nine years off from music because she knows you won’t forget her. And can’t. She’s made pop culture a far more exciting place.
Surveying an adolescence spent in the spotlight, she says, “I had a lot of doubts. Actually, after Music of the Sun … doubt grew every album,” she reminisces through puffs, her voice descending into a soft purr. “You actually think you have to have a number-one album to be successful or to think you made it. You feel like you failed if your album became anything less than number one. That was the era of music at that time.”
“I’ve always been afraid of how much is me versus what I’ve been influenced by,” she says of the trajectory of her career. “I left home as a teenager, and I left everything I knew: my family, my friends, my food, my culture. And I came to a big city by myself, and the only option for me was to win. I knew that I had to win. The suffering that I felt not being a part of anything that I knew, there was only one way to make that worth it, because I knew that my family was suffering without me too. And so I was like, ‘There’s no way. This has to pay off.’ And that was my fight, my goal, my everything. Every single day. I only got to see my family at Christmas. So I spent the year just going for it until I saw them. As a child, I could only handle so many emotions. And the one emotion I could never handle was disappointment. I didn’t know where to put that. It was a feeling that was so disheartening, and it actually pulls a lot of emotions into that box. You’re sad, you’re angry, you’re hurt. And I didn’t know how to handle disappointment.”
Not that much disappointment has been part of her story. Rihanna is the best-selling female recording artist of the 21st century. She has seven U.S. diamond-certified singles and 14 number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100. She’s won nine Grammys, been nominated for an Oscar, and starred in five movies. Her Super Bowl halftime performance was one of the most watched in history, and she was the first woman of color to helm an LVMH fashion house. She is so much a part of the zeitgeist that she sold one million album units in the U.S. in 2024 without even releasing an album in the 2020s.
I ask her if in those rare instances, when disappointment comes, does it come more easily? “[What I know] is that you’re carving your journey. And every disappointment, letdown, hurt, good, weird, uncomfortable—it’s all for you. All of your experiences, they’re actually preparing you for the next step. I look at my childhood and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, God already knew that this is how my life would look. And if I didn’t go through this or if I didn’t do that or if my family didn’t have that sense of humor, comments online would probably hurt my feelings.’ It’s like I was being prepared for this all along.”
This is the eminent position of one of our last few celebrities who have that impossible-to-fake rock-star life and energy to match. She stays up all night and looks amazing doing it. Come for her on social media and expect a clapback, personally written by @badgalriri herself. (She’s quick to correct me when I comment on her sweet nature: “I’m not that sweet, but I am honest,” she quips.) She’s your favorite celebrity’s favorite celebrity; just look at the viral clips of Martha Stewart, Natalie Portman, and Jennifer Lawrence all declaring their admiration.
To hear Rihanna talk about fashion is to watch her truly come alive. Her commitment to serving a look knows no bounds. An everyday errand run requires the same level of sartorial commitment as a trip to Giorgio Baldi, a nondescript Italian eatery popular with L.A.’s celebrity set.
A few days before our meeting, Rihanna wore a vintage Fall 2002 Christian Lacroix furry turquoise wrap coat and matching hat, pulled from the brand’s archives by her stylist Jahleel Weaver, to London’s Fashion Awards. Online, the look was divisive; people either loved or loathed it, but one thing’s for certain: As the resident enfant terrible of fashion, only Rihanna could pull it off. “You think?” she says. “I think Pam [Anderson] could, but she would wear it tighter. I wanted to have fun. Number one, it wasn’t my award. I was there to support Rocky for such an incredible achievement.” Together with Rocky, who wore an understated Bottega Veneta pantsuit, the two stole the show. “There was a beaded apron, the hat, the gloves, the waist cincher under the corset, and, oh my Godddd, the most beautiful pair of YSL pumps. I can’t believe YSL made those shoes. I love them!” she coos.
I ask, how does she have the energy?
“I don’t,” she says bluntly. “I can’t believe you’re saying that. I am exhausted. I am tired. I am done, over it. Sometimes I’m just hungry. I went to Giorgio’s the other night in my Savage onesie. I was like, the only thing I’m going to do right now is put heels on, and that’s it. I just want to eat. Why do I have to dress up for that? I just want the food.”
Her looks, while always legendary, hit a new stratosphere while she was pregnant, when she single-handedly rewrote the style rules for mothers-to-be. She wore a Dior babydoll dress with the lining ripped out, exposing and celebrating her belly, while pregnant with her first son, then a chocolate-brown leather harness Alaïa gown and vintage Jean Paul Gaultier halterneck mesh dress worn over a sequined bikini while pregnant with her second. What could have been just a display of incredible looks turned into a transgressive and highly charged political statement that changed the conversation on the pregnant body—more specifically, what it looks like and how it should be dressed. Now postpartum, she is still figuring out where her style fits in her new reality.
“I feel like getting dressed is a fight on its own [now],” Rihanna explains. “Everything is so … logical. What makes sense? What’s easy? What’s fast? I try not to overthink all that stuff, but you’re leaving the house. It kind of stops you from going out. How much energy do I have to put into getting ready? Doing my makeup, doing my hair, and then going to the closet and figuring out which three things in this entire room make sense together? You go through a fog. And fashion is so much fun, and I miss the fun.”
Jawara Alleyne, the Caymanian-Jamaican designer, found an early champion in Rihanna. The designer, who resides in London and who is revered in the fashion space for his colorful sliced, diced, deconstructed, and safety-pinned-together tees and gowns, has created custom pieces for the singer. “She has this innate ability to transform anything she wears into a statement, and that’s incredibly powerful,” Alleyne says. “People see her wearing my designs and immediately understand the value and integrity behind the work. She’s the epitome of confidence, creativity, and authenticity, which perfectly aligns with my vision as a designer.”
Rihanna acknowledges that she is “starting to have fun again” when it comes to getting dressed. “Now I’m starting to just remember what I loved about it: the juxtaposition, putting the things together that don’t make sense. My fashion has always been driven by my mood, and my mood was on mom mode for a minute.”
A glance at the wallpaper of her phone suggests her kids are never not on the brain. Pictures of her young brood illuminate the screen. I ask her to describe them, beyond the adorable clips we’ve seen through social media. “RZA is just an empath,” Rihanna explains. “He’s so magical. He loves music. He loves melody. He loves books. He loves water. Bath time, swimming, pool, beach, anything. And Riot, he’s just hilarious. When he wakes up, he starts to squeal, scream. Not in a crying way. He just wants to sing. And I’m like, ‘Okay, here we go!’ He’s my alarm in the morning! He’s not taking no for an answer from anyone. I don’t know where he came from, dude,” she adds, describing a boisterous personality that, from observation, doesn’t seem unlike her own. “Don’t say that. Wait until you meet him!” Riot’s name came courtesy of Pharrell Williams, who worked with A$AP Rocky on Rocky’s 2023 song of the same name. “He gave us this name thinking it was going to be a girl, because he had seen something online. Pharrell is very deep. He’s not surface. He will never say anything and just leave it there with a full stop. He will have the entire history: the energy, the time, the month that it is.” She explains RZA struggled with the introduction of a baby brother, “like all [new] siblings do, and at first Riot was understanding that his role was being the little brother. Now he knows he’s in charge.”
When news of Rihanna’s pregnancy in early 2022 came to light, it was hard to imagine two of music’s coolest characters swapping club-hopping for Chuck E. Cheese. Rihanna tells me that the “greatest thing” about Rocky “is seeing him be a dad. His pureness. His charm. I’m annoyed because my sons sometimes just live for him more than they live for me,” she says. “And I’m like, ‘Did you know who cooked you? Do you know who pushed you out?’ And they love him, but when I see it, oh, it’s the best.”
Rocky and Rihanna grew up in the music scene together. They partied at the same clubs, appeared in each other’s music videos, and flirted during a 2012 VMA performance before making anything official. When they finally got together in 2019, they were like a millennial Bonnie and Clyde, just impossibly good-looking. The two are spotted in New York’s hole-in-the-wall bars as often as in its hottest restaurants. She explains that after flying in from a recent trip, when she was understandably ready for bed, Rocky had other ideas. First stop: a late-night run to New York’s famed Joe’s Pizza. “Then he’s like, ‘I want to go to the arcade,’ ” and then they ended up at Radio, a jukebox bar and one of the couple’s favorite watering holes. “And I was just like, ‘I’m in Ugg slippers, sweats, and a busted-ass face because I just woke up.’ ” They are determined to escape the celebrity ivory tower, particularly in New York (Rocky’s hometown), where they can more easily mix in with the public, she explains. “We like to eat with people. We like to shop with people. We like to walk the streets with people. I don’t like a private room. I don’t have them shut down stores. I don’t like the Rapunzel life. It’s very isolating. It’s very lonely. And what am I protecting myself from? I’m actually allowing people to dictate the robbery of the life that I could actually be living.”
Tabloid shots of them giggling, singing karaoke, and canoodling in bars make it seem like the two live as if no one else is watching, even if, in reality, millions are. “That’s a big thing for us and actually a really big thing for him,” she notes. “He always reminds me, no matter how hard everything is that we’re dealing with in our life, in our careers and as parents, he’s like, ‘Remember when we were friends? Remember when we just used to have fun as friends?’ ”
Three days after Rihanna had her first baby, she was on a Zoom call. With the second baby, she recalls, “three days out of the hospital, I was in a meeting in person with a robe and a belly that looked like I was still pregnant.” Even icons don’t get a proper maternity leave.
But this is how involved Rihanna is in her many businesses. “I care because my name is on it,” she says. “I don’t want my name to represent anything that I didn’t stand for.” In addition to all things Fenty Beauty, which she launched in 2017 and which has branched out into skincare and hair care, she has expanded her popular Savage X Fenty line and relaunched Fenty x Puma, her collaboration with the sportswear giant that had previously been on hiatus since 2018. And if Rihanna keeps going, there’s more: “I want to do furniture. Home design.” I suggest wine perhaps, a nod to the meme-worthy paparazzi photos of her carrying wineglasses from the dinner table home with her. “You know what?” she contemplates. “I think I’ll do wine later in my life. Because I respect the art of it all, and we would want to have our own family vineyard.” I ask her why she feels she’s got the proverbial Midas touch when it comes to her businesses. Why do people believe what she’s selling? “You know what? I’ve never underestimated the consumer. I think a lot of people underestimate the consumer. They think that they can maybe pull the wool over the consumer’s eyes and sell them what the ideal of beauty should be. And I don’t know if it’s the era of social media or just time, but people are not dumb. People are not blind to what’s happening. They understand the marketing; they understand the strategy. They know when you’re being fake.”
“I think it’s because she doesn’t force it. It’s just who she is,” muses her longtime creative collaborator Willo Perron, who she worked with on her world tours and Savage X Fenty fashion shows, as well as her 2023 Super Bowl performance. “It’s second nature for her, and she’s not concerned with what others are doing. She stays focused on what she wants to create and how she wants to express herself. That effortless cool comes from the fact that she genuinely doesn’t have to try. It’s innate.”
Work, and holding it up to the standards that Rihanna requires, becomes more fraught when constantly bookended by motherhood. Every commitment is a careful calculus. “Every decision I make revolves around them, but everything that I do that I love robs me from them,” she says. “So I have a weird resentment with the things that I love. You almost feel like something is always suffering for you to show up somewhere. And even when you show up there, it’s not 100 percent because there’s something else on the wheel. It’s actually given me a lot more self-guilt. I don’t like letting people down, but I also know that most of that is me letting myself down, which means something has to change, but everything is on the wheel at all times. I have to keep reminding myself that I asked for this, I love this. I try to figure out a balance so that I can feel fulfilled when I show up to something, so I can feel I don’t have any guilt.”
It has also meant that some of her other passions have had to wait. In fact, so long has the time been since 2016’s Anti, Rihanna’s most recent and critically revered album, that arguably Gen Zers and beyond won’t even think of her as just a musician—more a business and cultural omnipresence. Her music is where even her most die-hard fans become her harshest critics, impatient at the nine-year wait for a new album. Recently, she went back and listened to Anti, mining her own music almost as a fan rather than as its voice.
“I listen to Anti from top to bottom with no shame,” she says. “I used to always have shame. I actually don’t like listening to my music, but Anti—I can listen to the album. It’s like it’s not me singing it, if I’m just listening to it. That’s the one album that I can have an out-of-body experience where it’s not like … You know when you hear your voice in a voicemail, and it’s like, ‘Ugh.’ ”
The time with her music reinforced where she wants to take it next. “I think music is my freedom. I just came to that realization. I just cracked the code on what I really want to do for my next body of work. I am actually feeling really good about this. I know I kept saying this over the years.”
There have been many rumors on the stylistic direction of R9,the fan name given to the long-awaited record. A reggae album was buzzed about in 2018, though she’s quick to debunk this: “Way off! There’s no genre now. That’s why I waited. Every time, I was just like, ‘No, it’s not me. It’s not right. It’s not matching my growth. It’s not matching my evolution. I can’t do this. I can’t stand by this. I can’t perform this for a year on tour.’ After a while, I looked at it, and I was like, this much time away from music needs to count for the next thing everyone hears. It has to count. It has to matter. I have to show them the worth in the wait. I cannot put up anything mediocre. After waiting eight years, you might as well just wait some more.”
Still keeping the details close to her chest, she shares that she’s “feeling really optimistic. This feels right. It feels like it digs right into where I need to be, and I want this. This body needs to come out, and I’m ready to go there. This is becoming my new freedom, because when I’m in the studio, I know that my time away from my kids is to blossom something that hasn’t been watered in eight years. I’ve been in the studio the whole eight years. But it didn’t hit me. I was searching for it. I went through phases of what I wanted to do. ‘This kind of album, not that album.’ I know it’s not going to be anything that anybody expects. And it’s not going to be commercial or radio digestible. It’s going to be where my artistry deserves to be right now. I feel like I’ve finally cracked it, girl!”
Until then, her newest role involves becoming the face of Dior’s storied fragrance J’adore. Rihanna first worked with Dior back in 2015 when she appeared in a fashion campaign as a Dior brand ambassador. But her relationship with the brand goes back much further than that. “My first introduction to J’adore Dior was my mom. My mom used to sell perfume at a duty-free store. She would come home with the testers when they were down to the end and they have to put out a new tester. J’adore was one of those ones that were always there. And that’s where my love for J’adore started.” Plus, it’s fun to say. Rihanna coaches me to say the name of the fragrance like she does in the commercials, breathy and sultry. For a few minutes, we just say “J’adore” back and forth to each other.
The campaign shoot, photographed in the Palace of Versailles, coincided with the eve of her 36th birthday. At the stroke of midnight, Rocky arrived and surprised her with the kids to celebrate. As she recalls a sentimental memory, it’s clear she’s taking time to enjoy a life that’s been decades in the making.
“Getting old is shit, but it’s also a blessing,” she says. In all the unpredictability of her very unique life, she has manifested her dreams of domesticity into existence, and she knows its sanctity. “My legacy is right now. That’s all I have the most control over. My legacy is what I do with my time at this moment. How am I present with the people around me? How am I grateful? How am I making this a happy moment? How am I making a memory? I’m even in the space of not even spending my money on things, but I’ll spend my money on an experience. That’s something no one can take from me. Somebody could rob me right now of everything I have, [but] they will never take a memory, an experience, a feeling, a scent that reminded me of that moment. There’s just things that mean more when you grow up.”
The April issue of Harper's Bazaar starring Rihanna is available to buy from 13 March
Hair: Yusef for Fenty Hair; makeup: Priscilla Ono; manicure: Kim Truong for Aprés Nail; production: Day Int.; set design: Philipp Haemmerle. Special thanks to Jen O’Hill and Fenty Corp.
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