Rihanna Introduces The Concept Of Look-At-Me! Camouflage

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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 prioritize 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?”

British Vogue’s Daniel Rodgers, 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.

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).

Rihanna attends the Savage X Fenty Celebration of Lavish Lace Debut at Nordstrom Century City on October 10, 2024.

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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.

Marni AW24.

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Knwls AW24.

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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.