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| Rihanna at the 2018 Met Gala |
Singer, songwriter, actress, businesswoman, and most recently, diplomat Robyn “Rihanna” Fenty, more commonly known as Rihanna, was born in Barbados in 1988. Since her beginning, she has become one of the up-and-comers of Forbes’ America's Richest Self-Made Women with an estimated net worth of $210 million, started her own businesses Fenty Beauty and Savage x Fenty, caused Snapchat stocks to crash, starred in the blockbuster hit Ocean’s 8, won the VMA Vanguard award, won 9 Grammy’s (nominated for 33), founded the Clara Lionel Foundation, and was named ‘Extraordinary & Plenipotentiary’ Ambassador to Barbados.
In her musical career, she constantly re-defined herself and her style. From her premiere album, Music of the Sun, songs like Pon de Replay channeled the Bajan club beat from her upbringing. By her third album, Good Girl Gone Bad: Reloaded, she had defined herself as a sex symbol in the music industry. She then continued to draw inspiration from Rock, Reggae, RnB, and Pop music until her most recent and most successful album Anti. Anti alone won two Grammy’s and became the first album to have eight tracks go No. 1 on the Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. Anti departed from her old music that had been filled with upbeat songs to this less commercial album that is described as “slow, meditative, and raw” by one journalist for Vanity Fair.
The title of the album itself was a nod towards the different direction she was taking in the music industry. Her producer described how the language used when creating the album shifted from “let’s make a great album” to “let’s make a masterpiece.” As seen in our first class, music can oftentimes be a repeat of what other artists did. It can be repetitive, and many of the Top Hits are songs that anyone could have made. Rihanna made it her mission for this album, Anti, to be anti-mainstream, something that only she could create and sing.
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| Rihanna with cover art from her most recent album, Anti |
In the middle of the release of Ocean’s 8, Rihanna then unveiled her beauty line Fenty Beauty in collaboration with Kendo on September 8th, 2017. The beauty line cumulated up to $100 million in sales within just 40 days and had waitlists on certain products for months. Some of her most notable launches have included 40 different shades of foundation, the Stunna Lip Paint, and Body Lava.
Rihanna had grown up watching her mother apply makeup, and she found herself bothered by the fact that beauty products were not readily available and accessible for women of color and black women in general. Rihanna wanted to re-define what society considered “nude,” and she took it upon herself to display the many shades that nude could be. There has been, and still is, a huge disparity in the beauty industry that has left many women of color without any resources to feel comfortable in their own skin or express their individuality in the form of makeup. In particular, her Stunna Lip Paint was an act of defiance. There has been a large historical battle between women’s femininity and red lip gloss. For years, makeup was considered taboo as it was associated with prostitution. Black women in general struggled with these beauty standards even more. This color choice was described as assertive, confrontational, and unapologetic by a beauty guru from Buzzfeed.
Rihanna saw this disparity for people that shared her own identity, and in order to solve this problem, she also looked to expand it towards fixing the problem for all. Not only was the problem in the representation and diversity of beauty products but also in the accessibility from an economic standpoint. Luxury products — which are often times much less diverse in their shades — will have 30mL foundations that can be more than $125. Fenty Beauty foundation in comparison is $34. In 2016, the beauty industry was worth $25 billion. Latinas spent roughly $4.3 billion on beauty products, and black women spent $2 billion on beauty products with 47% percent of it going towards cosmetics. Rihanna’s creativity was not constrained by the fact that she did not had years of professional experience in the beauty industry, but rather she saw the problem, and she used her own personal resources to fix it. In an interview with Refinery29, Rihanna stated:
“there are so many different shades, there’s red undertones, there’s green undertones, there’s blue undertones, there’s pink undertones, there’s yellow… You want people to appreciate the product and not feel like, ‘Aw, that’s cute, but it only looks good on her.’”
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| Fenty Beauty |
When Rihanna first launched her lingerie line Fenty x Savage, she had the same motivations as she did behind her launch of Fenty Beauty: lingerie that is beautiful, accessible, and diverse. She named it Savage with a very particular brand theme that she wanted to share. In her words:
“Savage is really about taking complete ownership of how you feel and the choices you make. Basically making sure everybody knows the ball is in your court. As women, we’re looked at as the needy ones, the naggy ones, the ones who are going to be heartbroken in a relationship. Savage is just the reverse. And you know, guys don’t like getting the cards flipped on them—ever.”
Not only was Rihanna focused on making lingerie shades that fit every skin tone, but she also wanted to represent multiple different body types. She had found herself being made fun of for her weight, and she has been body shamed numerous times. Rihanna never took it upon herself to speak out against each instance of body shaming that she received, but rather, after her success in the makeup industry, she saw a similar problem that she had experienced personally, and she took it upon herself to fix it globally. When initially presenting her line, she took it a step further to present it in a way that was both creative and rebellious. Rihanna decided to take her line, model it herself in a holographic presentation that was stunning, elegant, and defiant. She took it upon herself to make sure every woman— no matter size, shape, or color —felt comfortable in their most intimate state.
Rihanna is a self-proclaimed night owl that found that her most creative ideas come past midnight. In an interview with Vogue, she described getting to bed before 4:00 am as early, but what is so revolutionary and creative about Rihanna’s process is not even just the resulting product, it is the way that she is able to utilize her own personal values and experiences to offer the field something raw and unique to her. Rihanna’s creative process in the music industry, beauty industry, and even philanthropic work, echo Gardner’s ideas from his book Creative Minds (1993), more specifically, the concepts of The Child and The Master and the Life-Course Method. She took her experiences and turned them into product, whether: her childhood in Barbados affecting not only the undertones of her music but also her philanthropic work in future years, her traumatic experience with domestic violence and abuse from ex Chris Brown resulting in deeply personal music such as Man Down and her strike back against Snapchat, or the memories of her mother applying makeup and not being able to find a suitable product for her skin tone. Her domain and her field were, and are, constantly changing and evolving as she develops more personal experiences and resources such as co developers and creatives met in prior fields. As Gardner put it, there were multiple “reorientation[s] of [her] domain.” This constant reorientation and evolution of her process to create truly meaningful and influential work is what launched her from mini c to small c to Pro-c, and finally, to a Big C, as defined by James C. Kaufman in The Four C Model. She has created a whole new domain in music, beauty, philanthropy, and the overlapping nature of them all.
Click here to learn more about The Clara Lionel Foundation, and look into purchasing products from Fenty Beauty and Savage x Fenty to support diverse and accessible beauty products.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/leticiamiranda/heres-why-rihanna-is-the-perfect-person-to-sell-you-red
http://time.com/5394342/rihanna-diamond-ball-2018/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2018/07/16/rihannas-net-worth-210-million-in-2018/#4dabfbdd4548
Some big names like Rihanna have done so much, it gets easy to lose track of just what they've managed to accomplish. This post was a great opportunity to take a step back and truly appreciate everything she has created. As a woman and minority figure, she's no doubt faced extra obstacles as she's built a name for herself. Being a musician, however, gave her the enormous asset of a platform to launch her makeup brand from. In my blog post, I covered another woman of color who started her own beauty company, but without any benefit of fame or connections. It was an entirely different journey, but she has fortunately found some success as well. Women all face different sets of challenges, but as they keep on proving what they're capable of, the future will continue to look promising.
ReplyDeleteI've always felt like Rihanna was unique in her fame thanks to her ability to both draw inspiration from her roots, and then expand upon that and give back to a community even bigger/wider than the one she came from. She came from a relatively small island community, found inspiration and fame in that, and then gave back not only to her community (although she definitely has done that) but to women of color as a whole. She's like a prism, magnifying and reflecting everything she has. Additionally, she's such an individual that her process and her product are both driving, captivating forces.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I find so fascinating about Rihanna is her versatility, which I see as a product of intrinsic motivation. Rihanna was not content to simply conquer the music world, but had to also engage into incredibly successful forays into the beauty industry, the fashion industry, business, acting, and even politics as well. As Gardner put it in Chapter 2 of his book, when one is intrinsically motivated, “what was once too challenging becomes attainable and even pleasurable, while what has long since become attainable no longer proves engaging.” Whether it be within her own work or throughout a variety of domains, Rihanna is a big C Creative because she is always moving and evolving.Once she conquers one domain, she moves on to the next to be challenged and inspired by the new, and the every domain she chooses to tackle is all the better for it.
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