Rihanna This article is more than 12 years oldThe ugly truths behind Rihanna's beautiful body
This article is more than 12 years oldDeborah OrrUS Vogue's cover picture of the pop star reminds us that fashion prefers to keep silent on feminist issuesUS Vogue has just published "the 10th annual shape issue", in which the bodies under the clothes become the main editorial focus. Or something. Rihanna the 24-year-old pop star, is on the cover, looking heavenly. The body under the clothes is certainly the focus. Rihanna's dress is low-cut to display her cleavage, and the rest of it is pretty sheer anyway, enhancing beautifully a figure that needs little enhancement. It's a very lovely image of a very lovely woman. What's not to like?
For me, it's the uncomfortable feeling that this is an invitation instantly to deconstruct this particular body, applying fiendishly complex and weird rules about female display that are bound up with fashion, beauty, race, class, sex, popular culture, pornography, misogyny and violence against women. Also to do it quietly, even subconsciously, if possible, as the whole, large area is so fraught with controversy that it is just bad manners to acknowledge that it is a means of non-verbal communication that is central to western culture.
And it is indeed bad manners. In fashion circles, it's bad manners to talk about any of the stuff that exercises not-so-radical feminists – unrealistic projections of body image, the dominance of white women in modelling (or gay men in designing), how Vogue near- nakedness differs from Playboy near-nakedness, how rich and sexually available women are free spirits, while poor and sexually available women are whores too thick to charge for their services . . . Fashion "plays" with this sort of projection all the time. But taking it seriously is never on-trend.
None of this has very much to do with Rihanna herself.
The whole point is that she has risen above such matters (having prospered after breaking with a partner who hit her). Vogue is an elitist publication, and in its versions around the world it confers some sort of imprimatur on pop-cultural figures by anointing them with high-profile editorial attention. In turn, it burnishes its own supremacy in "taste-making". The ugly thing is, however, that gorgeous exceptions, somewhere down the line, prove ugly rules.
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