Hoochiekingjay12

I have been bewitched, both body and mind—entirely and completely taken under a powerful and potent charm. As a playfully melancholy man from the islands who suffers from a chronically unimpressed disposition, there is not much that moves me to the point of obsession. In fact, the things that most often capture my attention, especially lately, tend to exist within one sphere: politics. However, much like miracles and magic, there are exceptions—people and places that manage to possess my soul and imprint themselves upon the deepest parts of my psyche. Robyn Rihanna Fenty captivates me in ways few public figures can. Mysterious, elusive, frustrating, talented, and folkloric, Rihanna transcends the traditional monotony and drudgery of celebrity culture to accomplish the monumental task of being an… actually interesting person. In her latest editorial effort, Rihanna, in collaboration with Szilveszter Mako and Edward Enninful, manages to do the impossible: create arresting art that actually says something without the unnecessary rigmarole and finger-wagging that so many other public figures seem interested in pursuing these days.

The world is currently at war, in both the figurative and literal senses. The sleeping giant of technological oligarchy, once held back by government, has now awakened and appears intent on devouring every human in its path—draining us of our ability to create, to commentate, and even to complete the most mundane tasks, effectively replacing living, thinking people with hollow, unintelligent husks. Let’s make one thing be clear: money cannot buy class, nor can it properly bestow taste. Taste is earned, and it is earned by doing the very thing the wealthy often dislike most: working. One must sift through thousands of pages of books one dislikes to discover the pearls one will come to love. One must listen to hours of uninspired, tedious, and talentless music in order to shape a proper musical ear and create a distinct musical pedigree. Even the films one chooses to consume require a slow process of watching, thinking, deconstructing, and reconstructing in order to develop a sense of artistic value. Yet for the wealthy, why do that when one can simply pay others to attach an aesthetic to oneself and smile for cameras, only to end the night admiring one’s own self-importance? Fashion, and editorials especially, have lately seemed to fall into the realm of being spiritually artificial: a sad and predictable occurrence in which a celebrity is inserted before a blank background, accompanied by a cheeky Instagram-caption-style headline from 2016. It is tiring. To see Rihanna and Edward sit down with intention and craft a shoot with purpose and a clear statement behind it felt like drinking water after years of being force-fed energy drinks.

All buildings need a strong team to bring them to life: architects, stonemasons, steelworkers, and painters who move an idea from the mental sphere into the physical world. Likewise, every great piece of art needs both a platform and a creator, and these lush images benefit from some of the best minds and hands in fashion, each contributing serious weight to their realization. These photographs appear in EE72 Magazine, a platform created by Ghanaian-British designer Edward Enninful with one goal in mind: representation. Not representation as a surface-level gimmick designed to drive clicks in today’s rage-baiting journalism sphere, but representation as a form of editorial logic—the belief that the subject and point of view of art should guide the conversation, rather than the money and unearned taste behind the financing of corporate magazines. Enninful believes that fashion media should expand the frame through which we understand the world, spotlighting marginalized groups and treating their stories not as peripheral phantoms, but as central to the art of creation. For Enninful and Rihanna, there was only one person capable of creating these images: the wonderful and ever-fascinating Szilveszter Mako. Painterly, absurdist, and wholly theatrical, Szilveszter Mako is a Hungarian, Milan-based photographer whose public profile has recently grown significantly. He has produced excellent spreads with Elle Fanning and Bad Bunny, but the work that brought him into my world was his revelatory shoot with the ever-intriguing Rama Duwaji, First Lady of New York City. His work was a masterclass: a singular vision that felt as though a page from the Germanic fairy tales of Eastern Europe had been brought to life and placed in my hands. It’s hard to say what role Rihanna plays in pop culture and the wider world. Is she a musical artist basking in the light of a hard earned career. Is she a billionaire business titan with a tight image and singular vision for the beauty industry. Or maybe she’s just a relatable mom, someone that puts her pants on like everyone else and, has a aww Shucks Taylor swift level of parasocial closeness that makes everyone think she’s just like us. Whatever she is it’s quite obvious that Rihanna is in a state of change. She’s ready to do something different, something that we haven’t quite seen before and maybe this is the launching pad for that.

The images are arresting, seeming to be less an example of the celebrity fluff-piece photography that strangles the media space and more an example of modern Black contemporary painterly portraiture. Rihanna sits in front of a background that is both painted and solid, not as a person to be photographed, but as a woman on a throne. The shimmering Schiaparelli bird jacket in her hands looks like a writhing, flapping, living creature—something trying to escape her grasp—but, as cool as ever, Rihanna is taming it. There is a quality of chaos in these images, a thin layer of absolute madness lurking beneath the royal veneer that Rihanna embodies. In the second image, Rihanna’s crown—her onyx bouffant hair—stands out as a halo befitting a mythological figure, while her iridescent green Dior coat elegantly covers her body. She is like Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships—and, trust, Rihanna made some men launch some ships at the height of her musical career. She seems so ethereal on the cover, a woman pulled from a Bajan story to be placed into an editorial and adored by the masses. She is perfectly unraveling in her soft blue dress but still in control; with her blonde hair and striking eyes, she looks like a goddess of the Caribbean Sea. But beauty does not need to be soft in order to be appreciated. In her Bottega Veneta fiberglass skirt, she looks like the image of a warrior, a woman whose beauty does not put you at peace but places you in an uncomfortable spot. It is beauty as power, portrayed through a Black woman as a mythological figure.

Everything can be beautiful, and colors and images can strike us, but as the day winds down and the sun sets, the interpreter must make meaning of the art and imbue it with his own sense of life and assurance. This spread was simply incredible: a masterpiece of creation and collaboration. The truth is, we live in a society of public figures who suffer from Rapunzel syndrome. Everyone who is slightly anyone must lock themselves away from life to create a false sense of mystery, because they are not alluring in any shape or form beyond that faux mystique. And so, like many things in pop culture, it trickles down to the most irrelevant internet stan, who has now committed themselves to locking away any trace of interaction on the internet to prove how above it all they are. To see Rihanna and Edward actually collaborate, coming together as people to create a piece this good, is not just shocking but needed. We are a society; we are people, and nothing great can be made in solitude. Nothing truly incredible comes from one person alone. It is when we open ourselves up to others that we can truly craft art that will last beyond our time. In a globe enraptured by tradwives and by online men and women behind profile pictures criticizing who is too skinny or too fat, too calm or too over the top, to see Rihanna embody exactly who she is and refuse to bow is a marvel. Her body, her mind, and her creativity are her own property, not up for sale or rent to anyone. She is the embodiment of self-realization at its peak, not just a national treasure or a pop star, but a figure of myth—someone whose positive aspects will be exalted and exist beyond her own lifetime.