When it debuts later this month, it will make history.
Back in January, WWD reported that Rihanna was secretly working on a fashion line with French fashion behemoth LVMH, which owns several of the world’s most important fashion brands, like Christian Dior, Louis Vuitton, Celine, Fendi, and Givenchy, plus every kind of liquor you need for a good party (Hennessey, Chandon, and Chandon, to name a few).
Today, LVMH formally announced what will be called Fenty Maison, a brand which is “centered on Rihanna, developed by her, and takes shape with her vision in terms of ready-to-wear, shoes and accessories, including commerciality and communication of the brand,” according to a press release.
In the press release, Rihanna said, “Designing a line like this with LVMH is an incredibly special moment for us. [LVMH CEO Bernard] Arnault has given me a unique opportunity to develop a fashion house in the luxury sector, with no artistic limits. I couldn’t imagine a better partner both creatively and business-wise, and I’m ready for the world to see what we have built together.” It will show its first collection in a matter of weeks, with some outlets reporting that it will debut on May 22.
Already, the brand is doing things in a radically different way. Here’s everything we know about the brand’s history, strategy, look, and the people making it happen.
It’s historic.
Fenty Maison brings a whole slate of “firsts.” It’s LVMH’s first new brand since the conglomerate launched Christian Lacroix’s ready-to-wear brand in 1987 (LVMH sold that brand in 2005). Rather than giving young designers their own lines, LVMH (like its rival, Kering), primarily installs young visionary designers at legacy houses: putting industry darling Nicholas Ghesquiere at Louis Vuitton in 2014, for example, and Jonathan Anderson at then-sleepy leather goods brand Loewe in 2013. Remember: LVMH didn’t even give Hedi Slimane his own brand. Instead, he took over Celine.
Rihanna will also be the first woman of color to lead a luxury fashion house.
It’s coming sooner than we thought.
Rumors of the line began circulating in January, and piped up again when the Business of Fashion reported on the filings made by a French accounting firm in December of last year. But the announcement today confirms that the collection will debut in Paris later this month; the format and exact date are not yet clear.
It’s probably been in the works for years.
Rihanna was a major supporter of Christian Dior during Raf Simons’s tenure, becoming the first black woman to serve as a face of the house in 2015, and was often photographed with Arnault at the house’s shows.
Furthermore, her Fenty Beauty line, which she launched in the fall of 2017, is a subsidiary of LVMH. At the time of Fenty Beauty’s launch, she announced that her line with Puma was ending. As Shelby Ivey Christie, a former Vogue writer, pointed out earlier this year on Twitter, Puma is owned by Kering, LVMH’s direct competitor, so by first establishing her beauty brand almost two years ago, they set the stage for her fashion empire. (Her subscription service lingerie brand, SAVAGE X FENTY, which launched in May of last year, is a separate enterprise owned by TechStyle FashionGroup.)
It will be game-changing and directional—and maybe insanely expensive.
Unlike other major players in the fashion and music industries, Rihanna doesn’t shift culture by making splashy announcements. She just does things her way, and everyone follows suit. The fact that she’s showing her collection outside of the traditional fashion schedule that debuts womenswear in March and September each year, and that she is establishing her own singular brand rather than collaborating with another brand for credibility (much as Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen launched The Row)—all these suggest that Rihanna’s line will handily establish a new world order for the fashion industry, at least leading many other designers and brands to rethink how they do things.
As for what the clothing will look like? It isn’t likely to be a precise repeat of her sportswear-infused collections for Fenty—in the luxury world, you really have every resource at your fingertips to make the products of your dreams, and Rihanna emphasized that she was working with “no artistic limits.” (Great tattoo idea, btw.)
In addition to Rihanna, the team is made up of top-tier talent
This is probably the most significant decision to challenge industry norms. Fashion brands are often the work of several different brains but are presented as the work of a singular designer. A brand might have a creative director, and then a secretive staff of countless ready-to-wear designers, accessories designers, pattern-makers, stylists, and other staffers making the products a reality. Rihanna has been much-less tight-lipped about who helps her with her designs—she speaks often of her stylists, Mel Ottenberg and Jahleel Weaver, as creative collaborators, and credits American designer Matthew Adams Dolan for his work on her Puma line.
Fenty Maison debuts with an unprecedented amount of transparency about who is working on the project: WWD reported that Louis Vuitton womenswear ready-to-wear director Veronique Gebel, who had been with that brand since 2007, is working on the project, and Rihanna’s current stylist and junior creative director at Fenty Corps, Jahleel Weaver, announced on Instagram that he moved to Paris over a year ago to work on the brand. (He started as Ottenberg’s assistant—what a world!) Louis Vuitton men’s textile designer, James Bosley, also has a Fenty x Rihanna project listed on his LinkedIn account in addition to his full-time job with Rihanna’s new Vuitton colleague, Virgil Abloh. This is also just a smart business move: Rihanna has music and acting careers, as well, and making it clear that this is a team effort is a great way to avoid the burnout that other designers, like Raf Simons, have complained about.
No, it probably won’t be a bunch of garden tools
When BoF dug into Rihanna’s legal filings, they reported that the brand purpose was to conceive and create products across a huge number of categories—menswear, womenswear, children’s clothing, sportswear, sunglasses, and even “garden products.” The internet then went wild imagining that Rihanna was going to debut a line of watering cans and shovels. But that sort of filing spells out as many categories as possible to protect from infringement. The good news, though, is that a collection of Fenty Maison menswear seems more likely to arrive before a pair of Rihanna pruning shears.
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