Rihanna has a new release. But it’s not a single, or a new Fenty collection, or another Amazon Prime underwear show. It’s a “visual autobiography,” out on Oct. 24. Just over a foot wide and about one and a third feet tall, 15 pounds and full of glossy pictures, with a few gatefolds and special inserts.
Vanessa Friedman Well, this gives new meaning to “drop:” Rihanna’s 500-page tome. If it fell on your foot, it would crush it. She has put her stamp on almost every pop culture form — music, film, fashion — and now, books. Is this an effective addition to the canon? Let’s discuss.
Jon Caramanica In this era of social-media personal-brand saturation, pop megastars deploy so many different kinds of nontransparent transparency. But even in this, Rihanna is in a class of her own — not a strategic over-sharer like Taylor Swift, and not a floating-above-it-all icon like Beyoncé. What this book does particularly well is capture the off-the-cuffness of Rihanna’s celebrity.
V.F. In another time (maybe before Beyoncé introduced us to the concept of the “visual album”), this would have been called a coffee-table book. But by calling it a visual autobiography, it created — for me, anyway — all sorts of raised expectations.
I was envisioning a personal window on her life, starting back when she was actually Robyn Fenty and lived in Barbados, with some family history thrown in. We get a tiny taste of that — there’s an opening gatefold of her youth, complete with a report card — but then we jump straight to touring in 2011. So while it is true that after spending time with the book, I think I learned something, it wasn’t what I was expecting.
J.C. This easily could have been a 500-page doorstop of every hyperglam photo shoot Rihanna had ever posed for, but instead it’s a kind of behind-the-scenes travelogue, a Shutterfly book of one of the most famous people in the world.
V.F. But it’s a pretty glam travelogue. Maybe it’s simply the quality of the paper (high, large format), but I can’t help feeling that even what is theoretically behind the scenes — off-duty shots of Rihanna on safari, Rihanna on a yacht, Rihanna swimming — has still been Photoshopped into perfection.
As has her posse. You rightly point out that she mostly seems to be always having a great time with great friends, which is maybe how we want to imagine our celebrity idols. But who are they? What do they do? How did they meet? All these questions I want to know.
J.C. Melissa Forde! Jenn Rosales! Jahleel Weaver! Stars of the Rihanna Instagram ecosystem. That this book feels haphazard is both a liability and perhaps an unexpected asset. Most of the pictures appear to have been taken by a photographer with very good access, and around whom Rihanna does not appear walled off. There are several that offer accessible entree into wild circumstances — getting dressed for various galas and balls, smoking weed with Snoop Dogg and getting her famous torso tattoo. Whether that tells much about Rihanna — that’s something different.
Indeed, I learned much more about her from her recent Vogue cover story (and given my concerns about the desiccated state of that art form, and also the online pushback against that story, that’s saying a lot). But this tome is not about depth — it’s about fascination. For $150 — the “luxury supreme” edition is $5,500! — the truly faithful get an opportunity to ride along on tour, on vacation, on the runway. It’s niche merch coated with the imprimatur of art.
V.F. It’s telling that during the launch party at the Guggenheim, Rihanna told WWD that “my fans are young and they’ve got ADD; they’d rather look at pictures than read, let’s be real.” This is a book for the Rihanna Navy, not the public at large looking for illumination or understanding. Though it’s pretty pricey for a fanzine, even one elevated by a publisher of luxury tomes. In the same way that Rihanna has bent luxury fashion to her will, now that LVMH is backing her Fenty collection, she has bent the book biz. This is, effectively, simply putting more gold bricks into the pedestal on which now resides Rihanna. In that sense, I felt as if I did get some further insight into just how she is constructing her legend: with Russell James, Inez and Vinoodh, Dior and the Met Gala.
In fact, speaking of fashion, what I found fascinating was how important the industry clearly is to Rihanna. It gets almost as much play as music. And you’ve got to love all the drooling, please-wear-the-free-stuff-I’m-giving-you notes from designers that were reproduced for the world to see (and credit to her for exposing them).
For someone who clearly wants to be considered a designer, though, it’s surprising to me that there’s no real record of her doing any even pseudo-designing. That’s a ride-along I would appreciate.
J.C. I totally agree. And there are a few bits in here that go in that direction: the storyboards for the “Bitch Better Have My Money” video, which appear as a smallish insert late in the book; the photos of the vocal producer Kuk Harrell set up in what seems to be a hotel room, ready to record her.
I also found the “kitchen catwalk” spread — several photos of her strutting in different looks in what I imagine to be a commercial kitchen that doubles as a secret entryway to somewhere fabulous — to be a kind of display of work, the elegance and vim of her outfits juxtaposed against unglamorous obstacles.
V.F. She gives you these tantalizing glimpses, but only just barely, of the work she clearly puts in, and the rough edges that exist in any life. I was very struck by a photo buried amid all the others — a picture of her after the Miu Miu show hanging with Jared Leto on one side and Terry Richardson, a.k.a., the photographer who became a poster figure for sexual harassment, on the other. Not that Terry even gets an ID, like her other buddies. Was including him a tacit gesture of support? A mistake? Who knows?
J.C. Also telling is the opening picture from her 777 Tour, in 2012, in which she essentially kidnapped a planeful of journalists and flew around the world for seven concerts in seven nights. In the photo, she’s the target of dozens of cameras and microphones — that’s what happens when she steps outside the bubble for even a moment, which makes you appreciate, or at least sympathize with, the bubble.
V.F. Which brings up the other elephant in the room: Chris Brown, who is completely canceled in this version of Rihanna. We all make myths of our lives, I guess, smoothing them over, glossing them up for public consumption. This is, in the end, a knowing and self-conscious way of letting us in on that process. It leaves me both impressed and frustrated.
J.C. Which is to say, you’ve fully absorbed what it’s like to be a fan of contemporary mega-celebs, who deploy a very specific blend of bait and restraint. Social media has created a sense of intimacy and entitlement between fans and their heroes, and has also made very famous people develop new mechanisms of hiding.
To be fair, however, Rihanna has rarely been one to show her work — sweat is not her brand. On record, she rarely pushes her voice (though when she does, it’s impressive). In concert, she’s almost distractingly casual. She is alarmingly famous, but never seems to be stressing about it. If this book is to be believed, it’s because while millions upon millions of people hang on her every gesture, she’s somewhere with her friends, having a ball.
