I love Rihanna with every fiber of my being. She’s the only modern pop star who has successfully maintained “coolness” in every facet of her deportment, and her discography contains more jams than a Harry & David gift basket. What Rihanna isn’t, however, is a talented fashion designer. Her “athleisure” collaboration with Puma, Fenty X Puma By Rihanna, is a cornucopia of bad decisions. The style brief is as follows:
“In the spirit of Paris Fashion Week, this season’s FENTY collection interprets the romance and grandeur of French culture with a delicate color palette, luxurious fabrics, intricate ruffles and pleating, and playful bows and ties. Rihanna stayed true to PUMA’s sport heritage by reimagining and transforming traditional track suits, boxing robes, tennis dresses and polos. The collection continues to play with exaggerated and oversized shapes, while soft pinks, lavenders, and nudes compliment and contrast hard, edgy, sporty looks in olive and rich brown. The collection, designed for both men and women in mind, includes tiered jackets, in a lightweight onion skin fabric, embroidered tricot track dresses and suits, and jacquard pieces uniquely featuring the signature PUMA cat in a custom FENTY floral motif.” —tomandlorenzo.com
It is a known fact that everyone’s wildest fantasy is to look like Marie Antoinette when working out—really put the “Gold” in Gold’s Gym!—but does Rihanna’s new line satisfy this tall order? I’m going to take a gander at ten looks from Fenty X Puma By Rihanna and tell you how to work out in each of them.
First up, we have this off-white sweat-pant that appears to have the tear-away capacity of a Chippendale’s dancer paired with a silk blouse, a baseball cap/mosquito net, and a duster coat made out of a table runner at a buffet hall. All this excess fabric may trip you up while you’re running, but the lace sleeves of the coat are perfect for airing out your underarms while you do your bicep curls!
Here, we have a beige hoodie artfully stuffed underneath a tattered negligee topped off with bike shorts-style bloomers and stiletto-heeled Converse sneakers. Tatooine chic! If you can run in heels, this should be your half-marathon outfit. You can take off the negligee and wave it as a victory flag when you’re done!
A note about the pearls: Yes, they may be impractical. Yes, you may get sweat on them and they may tarnish. They may not. I don’t know. I am not a jeweler, and if you want a definitive answer to that then get yourself to Jared. All I know is that you will look like a million bucks when you’re boxing in this taupe-colored sigh of a garment.
This model must have recently escaped from a house fire and worn all of her clothes at once to save them from the conflagration. That’s the only explanation I have for wearing cargo pants, a corset, a brocade cassock tied up in the front for “sex appeal,” and platform sneakers in the same outfit. On the bright side, escaping from a house fire definitely would count as your cardio workout for the day!
Finally, a look that could conceivably count as athletic wear! Yes, the whole thing looks like it was repurposed from a hideous wedding dress, and that antebellum nightgown isn’t exactly aerodynamic. But who cares! Ditch it, strap on your pearl workout harness, and get on that elliptical! Just make sure you don’t forget your bedazzled bucket hat in your locker when you leave—it’s probably $20K.
We’ve come to the portion of the article where we pay our respects to Oscar the Grouch, who was clearly sacrificed in order to make this. If you’ve ever wondered, “What would a Templar Knight’s armor look like if it was rendered in breathable fabric the color of split pea soup?” then let this be your answer. You can’t lift weights with those oversize sleeves, and running with that superfluous ribbon of fabric is a recipe for falling on your face. Maybe you should just stick to stretching in this one.
In the interest of full disclosure, I love this whole-heartedly (though I would obviously wear a shirt under it; I’m not a monster). I have long said to close friends and random passengers on the C1 that my aesthetic is “Patrick Star if he were a mechanic at a disco,” and I have Rihanna to thank for feeling my fantasy. Impress everyone at your next Zumba class by rolling up in this number! It’s so roomy in this jumpsuit that you won’t have any issues doing the “Cha-Cha Slide” or whatever it is people in Zumba do.
It’s nice that Rihanna included hand fans in the latter portion of this collection as a thoughtful concession to the idea of athleticism. People get hot! Having an old-fashioned fan to whip out at a moment’s notice is the perfect way to both stay cool and throw shade. Wear this to a game of pickup basketball and serve up some “Michael Jordan-meets-Miss Piggy” couture. The platform Velcro sneakers will improve your fundamentals thanks to that extra height boost, and the incongruous oversized bow may disorient your opponents into letting you drive into the paint. A total slam-dunk of an outfit!
Obviously, this is an outfit for rowing. The colors will pop contrasted with your dull gray rowing machine, and it’s waterproof if you want to actually get in a boat. Otherwise, this garment raises more questions than answers. Why does this look like a purple version of the Gorton’s Fisherman’s jacket made out of the Von Trapp family’s curtains? Is that a diamond pacifier, a grill, a lip piercing, or a piece of food? Are chokers back? Is the dream of the ‘90s alive in Versailles?
Finally, we have BadGalRiRi herself. Her natural charisma is going a long way to sell me on the idea of this outfit, which otherwise looks like a lumpy duvet on the top and ‘70s bathroom tiling on the bottom. It vaguely resembles pajamas, which in turn vaguely resembles athletic wear, so I guess the concept of “athleisure” has been met? I’m not convinced. It just seems like an overdesigned schmatta rendered in drably colored fabrics—ugly and impractical. It’s a disappointing whiff from a creative genius, and I wish that Rihanna had pared down her tackier instinct in favor of a more cohesive and tightly defined collection. In short, not as much “Let them eat cake” and much more “Let them eat kale.”
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