Rihanna’s brands have quickly become synonymous with diversity over the last few years.
Her Fenty Beauty collection has been hailed for its range of foundation shades (50!), setting an industry standard and forcing other makeup companies to step up their game.
Meanwhile, her lingerie line Savage X Fenty has been praised for featuring racial, body, and gender diversity on the runway and for offering sizes up to 3X.
But rewind to 2017 when Riri was still collaborating with Puma and you’ll notice a pretty big difference: no plus-size models.
Ashley Graham even called her out at the time, saying,
“I was at Fenty last night, and that was an amazing show. But how dope would it have been to see some curves on the runway?”
As the fashion industry has *slowly* started to include more plus-size models, so has Rhianna. But unlike those other brands, she’s made it part of her mission to feature those models, not just include them.
At Savage X Fenty’s 2019 show, she featured models like Paloma Elsesser and Iskra Larence. And this year, she spotlighted Lizzo, Raisa Flowers, Chika, Tabria Majors, and so many more.
She also had more gender diversity than ever with transgender, nonbinary, and gender fluid folks like Indya Moore, Shea Couleé, and Gigi Goode.
For Rihanna, inclusivity has been a core value of Savage X Fenty. She explained,
“Inclusivity has always been a part of our brand. That’s not a ‘right now’ thing. It’s sad that it’s ‘right now’ for most brands.”
She added,
“I feel great that there are women that are feeling like they see themselves on the stage for the first time. And if we can continue to expand on that, we’ve done more than we really started out trying to do.”
For her lingerie line, in particular, she wants to make sure that women of all shapes and sizes are made to feel sexy.
“They’re sexy, and they need to know that, and they need to be validated about that no matter what size they are.”
You can check out the entire Savage X Fenty show on Amazon Prime.
