Forever a fun fact about me: I’ve been pregnant 100% of the time as my personal style icon Rihanna. My own bump was just starting to swell with my second child when Rihanna revealed she was pregnant with her third ahead of this year’s Met Gala in May. Sitting on the couch in my living room—half-groggy from nausea medicine—I could hardly believe it wasn’t a mirage. I was officially going to endure a second pregnancy with Rihanna, who has redefined how women dress and could now hold my hand again as I navigated the queasiest and most uncomfortable months of my life.
For years, I’ve asked myself a simple question when caught in a fashion bind: What would Rihanna wear? The prompt has never spit out a disappointing result, and I’m guilty of copying Riri’s looks, sometimes head-to-toe, for everything from dinners out to my college graduation. And while worshipping Rihanna as a fashion god isn’t exactly novel, the universe has seen my piety and blessed me with something exceedingly rarer: two concurrent pregnancies with Rihanna.
Talking about Rihanna without sounding like I’m doing a Mean Girls impression is impossible. I mean, I dyed my hair red because Rihanna’s scarlet turned up on the cover of Vogue. That’s only the beginning: I wore studded shorts, creepers, rushed to the store to get a nude bodysuit, a Lakers jersey accessorized with red wine, and a Nike tracksuit for a transcontinental flight all because Rihanna did it first.
I can look back at the most important events in my life and see Rihanna’s influence plainly. For my college graduation, I searched out the perfect white skirt-suit and Chanel brooches and wore nothing underneath the jacket the same way Rihanna did while out shopping in Paris in 2013.
Little did that young woman in the white suit understand how important Rihanna’s style would become, though. While emulating the Bad Gal’s aesthetic was once about a single-minded pursuit of good fashion, clothes take on an entirely new meaning in pregnancy. My body changed in a flash and within a few months of both pregnancies massive sections of my wardrobe seemed off limits to me for an endless list of reasons: pants became uncomfortable, a shirt no longer slid easily over my growing stomach, and dresses made me look like I was smuggling a bowling ball. (Sorry, just a baby). Most pregnancy style advice suggests finding skin-tight dresses that seem to suggest I just keep dressing as if nothing has changed, or to shamefully hide everything away underneath a muumuu. (Rihanna, meanwhile, prefers Miu Miu.)
A month and some change after giving birth to my son, I had never been away from him for more than a few minutes, but I left for the first time to drive across Los Angeles and interview Rihanna at an Ulta. She was nearly at the end of her pregnancy with her first son RZA and was still finding ways to make her stomach the star. We bonded briefly over new motherhood and I complimented the chains draped like glittery string lights over her belly. “Belly chain extended, girl,” she advised. I held onto that hot tip until my current pregnancy. Three years later, I’ve made the extended body chain a staple of my pregnancy look, a style that feels emblematic of Rihanna’s whole approach to pregnancy style. Pre-Rih, it felt like I should be packing my belly away rather than making it the star of the show. The Bad Gal’s guide to pregnancy style prescribes dressing the tummy up with golden chains, pulling a shirt up and out of the way to give people a good view, and using sheer to maximum effect.
What I love about her pregnancy style and have adapted myself is that she treats the bump like it is the ultimate fashion accessory. She doesn’t act like her stomach is a bulky and burdensome carryall that couldn’t be left at home. Rihanna’s approach to pregnancy style treats the bump like it is a garment on loan from Jonathan Anderson—a here-today-gone-in-nine-months piece that must be capitalized on while it s here. Just this way of presenting her body felt radical to me. Of course, why shouldn’t I and every other pregnant woman be eager to show off evidence of our ability to literally make and sustain life?
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All of Rihanna’s best looks throughout her pregnancy have put her belly front and center. With a pair of faux fur garments—a billowing coat and crop top—she frames the belly like it s the work of an old master. For Gucci’s fall 2022 show, she wore a leather crop top and a long pendant over her belly. She uses sheer moments at the Oscars, Dior’s fall 2022 show, and the Smurfs premiere to draw attention to her growing midsection.
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Typically, celebrity style is infamously difficult to replicate. The best-fitting dresses might take countless sessions or pins to keep everything just in place. The fashion can be inaccessible, either through price, scarcity, or both. Not all of Rihanna’s pregnancy looks, though, which are sometimes real-world accessible. In the same stomach-embracing tune as her other masterworks, Rihanna has made potentially frumpy pregnancy gear a key axis that her fashion universe rotates on. I speak, of course, of the belly band, an intricate system of Velcro’d belts meant to support a woman’s stomach. It was something I once wore in desperation at home or hidden under a voluminous dress. Rihanna wore it outside her shirt for an eager crowd of paparazzi.
Rihanna’s bear-hugged embrace of the belly band epitomizes everything good about her pregnancy style to me. She doesn’t deny the difficulties, the discomfort, the reality of a growing and cumbersome stomach. She makes the most of it without sacrificing the meager comforts availed to women. The look I’ve stolen the most recently is a tank top with my belly and its supporting harness exposed.
Pregnancy is incredibly arduous, and I’ve often despaired that I’m especially bad at enduring it. I’ve never been able to metabolize the clichéd compliments passerby pay pregnant women: Your bump is so cute; you look radiant! Thanks, it weighs approximately ten trillion tons, and that glow is the post-nausea sweats. But watching Rihanna defiantly get dressed for a Dior fashion show or sexy date nights with A$AP Rocky, I felt that her bump was so cute. She did look radiant, beautiful, inconceivably cool, and stylish. Maybe I could, too.