New York Fashion Week: a time of the year filled with designer outfits on the runway, colorful makeup making its debut, and, usually, super skinny non-diverse models. But this year, the Savage x Fenty show screamed empowerment, self-love, and diversity. Yes, Rihanna really did that, and I, for one, am so in love with it.
Represented in this performance, which was honestly more of an art piece than just another fashion show, were pregnant women, fat women, skinny women, white women, black women – you name it. Taking place in a greenhouse-themed building that literally felt like a rainforest, models of all shapes, sizes, and colors performed beautiful choreography that made them all look like the actual goddesses they are.
Rihanna’s performance featured the Hadid sisters, which was obviously a pretty big selling point for this show, but it also featured Slick Woods, who strutted her stuff on stage in barely-there lingerie and nipple pasties about nine months pregnant. Um, hello, women are bosses, and this performance showed that all women can be sexy, even pregnant women, who tend to have a lot of stigma put on their bodies.
The performance reminded audiences of the Garden of Eden, where women rule. Rihanna had this to say about it: “It’s funny you say Garden of Eden, because it is mixing the really organic, authentic things of the world and meshing it with what we see in the future or what we hope to see in the future: Women being celebrated in all forms and all body types and all races and all cultures. It’s a celebration of womanhood. I think it’s a shame women have to feel insecure or self-conscious about how their bodies look. They’ve been taught by society that only one thing works.” Hell yes!
This celebration of all women’s bodies was so refreshing. Representation is extremely important to feeling confident about yourself, and so many models were represented in this show. As a curvier girl, I usually don’t see my body represented in the media as much as I’d like to – or as positively as I’d like to. I mean, my thick queen Barb totally got snubbed in Stranger Things, but I digress. This performance showed me so many girls with beautiful bodies that deviated from the norm I tend to see in the media – skinny girls, or perfectly curvy girls with flat stomachs and airbrushed thighs. This was real, and this was beautiful. The Savage x Fenty show was absolutely phenomenal, and hopefully paved the way to more diversity in the world of fashion.