When Rihanna failed to appear on the museum steps at this year’s Met Gala, the question was not so much, ‘Why?’–she suffered a sudden bout of the flu, apparently–but, ‘Why not?’ There are few people, after all, who are capable of conjuring a red carpet from a sidewalk, and a carriage from the backseat of a taxi cab, which is where the musician was last night drinking from a champagne flute before striding into the heartland of Tribeca to celebrate Mother’s Day.
She was dressed in a spring/summer 2003 Commes des Garçons T-shirt – sourced from Artifact, and knotted with a rakish Jawara Alleyne skirt – with a Gucci Horsebit bag and mesh opera gloves obscuring fistfuls of rings. A$AP Rocky–who, much like Callum Turner and Dua Lipa, is the handsome scaffolding to Rihanna’s mercurial experiments in clothing—was photographed beside her in a cropped and rib-knit cardigan, suit trousers and sensible shoes. “Like iron sharpening iron,” is how Rihanna once described their mutual and kismetic relationship with fashion.
The greatest coup of this double date-night weekend, though, was doubtless Rihanna’s rediscovery of a cropped Gucci coat, which Tom Ford had cut to emphasize the waist and shoulders from a decadent amalgam of suede, fuzz and sequins. Plucked from the designer’s final fall 2004 collection, that coat is perhaps the embodiment of what Tom Ford’s Gucci was about: cockiness, hedonism, bursting with feline powers, as if designed explicitly for the kind of woman who leaves champagne flutes in the back of a taxi. The kind of woman who doesn’t just wear clothes, but actively schemes with them.