BARE NOTHINGS
Rihanna's new shock frock
POP-star-cum-mobilepop-culture-installation Rihanna, a woman who has never knowingly overdressed, has achieved a new nude epoch by appearing in a frock that was not so much risqué as pure emperor’s new clothes.
Honoured with the fashion icon award by the Council of Fashion Designers of America at a ceremony on Monday, the singer-nudist picked up her gong sporting a swathe of transparent fabric, 21 000 not especially euphemistic Swarovski crystals and assorted tattoos.
The dress — such as it was — was custom-made by designer Adam Selman. The phrase “left nothing to the imagination” covers it about as generously as it covered Rihanna. Breasts and nipples were clearly visible, as was a generous expanse of shapely backside.
At one point, our heroine appeared awed by her own bootilicious asset in a classic callipygian moment (this 18thcentury term was derived from the ancient statue of the Venus Kallipygos, in which a partially draped woman raises her robes, glancing behind her to assess the perfection of her rear).
As actress Constance Bennett declared on viewing Marilyn Monroe’s derrière: “There’s a broad with a future behind her.”
A fur stole was artfully strung about the singing sensation’s mid-section, but this appeared less to conceal what some would refer to as RiRi’s “woman’s area” than to hide any hint of rounded stomach.
The skimpiest flesh-coloured thong covered the performer’s modesty. However, our heroine did respectfully cover her head, there being some limits.
The ensemble was slinkily reminiscent of the number that Monroe donned to pout “Happy Birthday, Mr President” to JFK. But it succeeded in making the screen legend look positively nun-like. Beautiful in its own way, stylish it was not: prizegiver Anna Wintour, hiding under her bob more furtively than usual, ruing the day she let such tawdry popstrels anywhere near Vogue.
But stylish is not always the point. The Renaissance, too, featured breast-exposing dresses, used for motives not dissimilar to Rihanna’s. In old age, chaste Elizabeth I exposed her bosom to her ambassadorial PR machine to illustrate bodily the political youth of her regime. Flappers not only bound their breasts, but were not averse to bearing them. Sixties chicks laughed in the face of concealment. Yves Saint-Laurent gave us the sheer blouse, Rudi Gernreich the topless frock.
Our heroine appeared awed by her own bootilicious asset
Still, we are unused to seeing entire bodies put out there. Twenty years on from Elizabeth Hurley’s career-generating, strategically safety-pinned Versace get-up, actual butt- and breast-naked nudity remains a rarity.
The message here is not merely about Rhianna as selfpromoting sex object, or the audacity required of a popbeing. It is about fitness, the leisure and determination to be this body beautiful — a tribute to abstinence as much as fleshy excess.
Whatever it is, it is not fashion. Compare the too-cool-forschool Olsen sisters in wristand ankle-skimming black widows’ weeds of which an octogenarian Greek matriarch would be proud. Now that, my darlings, is fashion. — © The