One Robyn Rihanna Fenty disconcerted luxury journalists everywhere this week when she deigned to let herself be papped in Timberlands, a Stüssy tracksuit, and a single, solitary strand of negligibly sized diamonds while in transit in New York City. Did Rihanna – a woman who once schlepped 55 pounds and a million US dollars worth of Guo Pei couture up the steps of the Met – just prioritise comfort? fashion editors asked one another in disbelief, clutching their Bottega Veneta Sardines like emotional support animals. What do you think would happen, a fellow writer texted me, if Rihanna became a capsule wardrobe evangelist? My colleague Daniel, ever the stoic, tried to take all of this on the chin while unconvincingly deploying the word “utilitarian” to describe Ri’s look, while I Slacked people that old Karl Lagerfeld chestnut about sweatpants and refreshed the Financial Times homepage in case the stock market crashed.
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It was something of a relief, then, to see Rihanna crop up on the wires at Nordstrom Century City on Thursday in an outfit that read the concept of “sweater weather” for filth. The (let’s face it: retired) musician arrived for the launch of Savage X Fenty Lavish Lace in a camo-print corset from her recent Diesel collab that obscured precisely nothing. This wasn’t lingerie dressing, to be clear; it was simply lingerie, paired with a Fendi coat and Swarovski-embellished YSL mules with shades of Sugar Kane Kowalczyk to them (not that Rihanna ever gets the fuzzy end of the lollipop).
If Ri has flirted with camo before (see: these Amiri pants), this is the closest she’s come to a full endorsement of the Full Metal Jacket print, which has stealthily been experiencing a revival of late. Demna, of course, has been deploying camouflage in his overtly political collections since the 2010s, but it’s Pharrell who helped push camo beyond its ’90s *NSYNC associations when he debuted his “damouflage” – a mash up with Damier chessboards – at Louis Vuitton’s spring/summer 2024 Menswear show. During the autumn/winter 2024 shows, meanwhile, the pattern proliferated on the womenswear catwalks in distorted forms that wouldn’t pass muster at The Pentagon; recall Marni’s painted bell dresses, Olly Shinder’s sophomore collection for Fashion East, and Knwls’s sequin-embellished separates. It’s camouflage, but “fashionified”, as Vogue’s Laird Borrelli-Persson put it – and no one does “fashionified” quite like Rihanna.
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