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The internet came to a standstill when Rihanna and A$AP Rocky announced that she’s expecting, and no one is more excited than the beauty from Barbados.
The couple went public with their relationship two years ago and shared their pregnancy news with a collection of pictures captured by celebrity photographer Miles Diggs, also known as Diggzy. The pics show 33-year-old RiRi’s growing baby bump as the couple stroll the streets of Harlem in New York, where Rocky (also 33) grew up.
The Work hitmaker is thrilled that she’s going to become a mom, an insider says.
“Having a baby is something she was never focused on, but being with Rocky opened her up to the idea. She couldn’t be happier and is she so excited to be a mom,” the source says.
“She’s loving all the changes to her body during pregnancy and has always celebrated pregnant women in her runway shows for Fenty.”
The lovebirds couldn’t be happier at the prospect of becoming parents. “They’re just like any other pair of parents-to-be. Yes, they happen to be famous but they’re just the cutest, giddiest young couple that’s expecting kids.”
Rihanna is worth an eye-watering $1,7 billion (R25,5bn), making her the wealthiest female musician in the world and the world’s second-richest female entertainer, right behind Oprah Winfrey.
She is best known as a hit-making singer, but it’s her cosmetics line, Fenty Beauty, that’s raking in the megabucks.
Her beauty range has been groundbreaking for its inclusive philosophy that women everywhere should be catered for. Her makeup comes in traditionally hard-to-match skin tones, formulas that work for all skin types and universal shades.
“In every product I was like, ‘There needs to be something for a dark-skinned girl, there needs to be something for a really pale girl, there needs to be something in between’,” she explained.
Her half of Fenty Beauty, which she co-owns with luxury brand LVMH, is worth $1,4bn (R21bn). The rest of her fortune is in her 30% stake in her lingerie company, Savage X Fenty – worth an estimated $270 (R4,05bn) – and her earnings as a chart-topping musician.
READ MORE | This is why Rihanna’s fashion label folded after less than two years
Rihanna didn’t set out to become a one-woman entertainment-fashion-beauty empire. “I didn’t have these dreams when I was little,” she told The New York Times. “I had a dream of making music – that’s it.”
Pushing herself creatively makes her happy. But fans aren’t happy that her creativity when it comes to music has taken a bit of a back seat – she hasn’t released an album since Anti in 2016.
She’s about a lot more than music now. “Rihanna is creating a brand outside of herself,” Shannon Coyne of consumer products consultancy Bluestock Advisors told Forbes. “She’s created a real style in the fashion and beauty space.”
Not all the singer’s ventures have enjoyed the same success. The pandemic forced her to call it quits last year on her luxury Fenty Fashion line, which she launched in 2019 with LVMH. Like Rihanna’s other brands that promise inclusivity, Fenty Fashion offered a wide range of sizes.
It was the star’s body-positivity message that drew SA influencer Thickleeyonce (real name Lesego Legobane) to the brand. “I’m going to be one of Savage X Fenty’s influencers who aren’t really ambassadors,” she announced last year. “Every month, I’ll be getting in their underwear and posting pictures of myself in the sexy merchandise.
“What I love about this deal is that I get to push my message of body positivity. I love how diverse they are with their range. I get to work with them through my agency.”
But in the week that Forbes announced RiRi’s billionaire status, Thickleeyonce tweeted the reason she was never seen in Savage X Fenty: she didn’t get a commitment she’d be paid. “I got a contract that didn’t say anything about paying me [so] I didn’t sign it because wtf?”
Fenty didn’t respond publicly to her tweet – but it wasn’t the first time it faced controversy.
Savage X Fenty came under fire last year when a US advertising watchdog, truthinadvertising.org (Tina), called it out for charging customers for subscription services without their consent.
“Unfortunately, Savage X Fenty’s diverse and inclusive marketing campaign is being used to lure unsuspecting consumers into unwanted negative-option offers [the practice of charging for a service unless you specifically decline it] that they are then having difficulty cancelling,” said Tina’s executive director, Bonnie Patten.
She explained that when shoppers add items from the website to their cart, a Savage X monthly membership is automatically added. At checkout, it has to be removed, which may cause the price of the items to rise sharply or even double.
READ MORE | TikTok star’s uncanny resemblance to Rihanna sends internet into a frenzy
Savage X Fenty has denied the claims. “We believe strongly in transparency, which is why we provide multiple disclosures of membership terms throughout the shopping experience, within advertisements and through our ambassador engagement policies,” a company spokesperson told The New York Times.
Rihanna had a tough upbringing in Barbados, where she lived with her parents, Monica Braithwaite and Ronald Fenty, and her brothers, Rajad and Rorrey.
“My parents had a very abusive relationship. My dad was an abuser. He hit my mother on numerous accounts,” the singer has said. “She never went to the hospital. Domestic violence isn’t something people want anybody to know.”
When she was nine her parents divorced, leaving Monica the sole provider for Rihanna and her brothers. “My mom worked a lot. She was never really home. I mean, she was home, but it would be after work, late at night, so I’d take care of my little brother, Rajad. He was my best friend. He thought I was his mom.”
Music became her escape. She formed a trio with two of her classmates and landed an audition for US songwriter and producer Evan Rogers.
“We sang as a group and then we sang individually, and Evan expressed an interest in helping me get a solo deal,” Rihanna told The Guardian.
That deal was with future hip-hop mogul and rapper Jay-Z, then president of Def Jam Recordings. Rihanna was 16 when he signed her to his label and she left home to move to America in 2004. “I didn’t look back,” she said.
She made her debut the following year with Pon de Replay and the hits kept coming – as did nine Grammy Awards.
Rihanna had been wary of expanding her brand beyond music and occasionally acting. “I saw Hilary Duff and Hannah Montana have so much success, but it got to a place where they were so oversaturated in the market it diluted their personal brands.
“It made me think, ‘I’m not going to do this because you lose your respect and credibility’. So every collaboration I did outside of music, I used Fenty so you didn’t have to hear the word Rihanna every time you saw something I did.”
As for new music, she’s not saying when R9, as fans have dubbed her long-in-the-works album, will drop.
“But I am very aggressively working on music,” she told Vogue. “I don’t want my albums to feel like themes. I feel like I have no boundaries. I’ve done everything – I’ve done all the hits, I’ve tried every genre – now I’m wide open. I can make anything I want.”
Sources: Forbes, Vanity Fair, British Vogue, The Guardian, Elle, Nytimes.com, guardian.com, twitter.com, bbc.com, apnews.com, tina.org, vogue.com
