One Size Doesn’t Fit All: How Rihanna’s Fenty Is Radically Inclusive

Around this time last year, there was a brilliant moment in a conversation between Edward Enninful and Rihanna as they discussed her then-upcoming British Vogue cover story. “You’re the one woman that every woman I know fancies,” grinned Edward to a blushing Ri. “It’s true! Why is that?” “OK, you’re asking the wrong person,” she laughed. “I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’m 'thicc' now.” She hit the nail on the head. If there has been one resounding response to Rihanna’s appearance among my circle of friends over the past year, it’s how phenomenally good her body looks: the sort of fabulously feminine curves that are at once astonishingly aspirational yet somehow relatable; all spilling cleavage and ample thighs. It’s also why, when she launched Fenty last month, it felt magnetically covetable. “I’m a curvy girl,” she told Vogue at the time. “If I can’t wear my stuff then it just won’t work. I need to see how it looks on my hips, on my thighs, on my stomach – does it look good on me or only on a fit model? It’s important.”

That approach could just have been well-worded marketing spin; after all, we’re living in 2019, through a new (and overdue) era of body positivity, where a homogeneous beauty ideal is (slowly) being dismantled. But then, last night, while flicking through Fenty’s latest drop, something hit me. There was a reason I was so painfully enamoured with a strappy satin dress that bears remarkable resemblance to countless others in my wardrobe: the woman wearing it. With no signposting, no virtue signalling, nothing other than a beautiful picture of a beautiful woman wearing a beautiful dress, it felt almost bizarre to even notice it – but her legs were more like mine than those of standard e-commerce models; the contours of her stomach slightly visible beneath the ruching. I scrolled down to the details: “model is 175 cm and is wearing size 42” it said (that translates to a UK 14; Fenty sizes scale up to a UK 18). I thought: maybe this is what I might actually look like in an item that I buy on the internet. I put it in my basket.

I can’t remember the last time I looked at a picture of a model on a shopping website and felt like that – and I spend an incomprehensible amount of time on shopping websites. That’s not to say that different sized bodies haven’t gradually been appearing throughout this industry – of course, Rihanna herself changed the game when she launched Savage x Fenty with plus-sized lingerie; earlier this month Nike installed a range of plus-sized mannequins in its London flagship; Alexander McQueen and Simone Rocha are introducing different types of women to their runway casting; brands like Universal Standard are leading the charge. But this woman’s body, integrated into a thoroughly ordinary e-comm offering, felt particularly powerful for its lack of fanfare.

There’s nothing inherently radical about a size 14 body – it’s just beneath the UK’s national average, and this woman’s is notably more toned than most – but seeing it there felt like a genuine step towards true inclusivity. “I ain’t no sample size no more, girl,” shrugged Rihanna in the Vogue video exploring the making of Fenty. Not many of us are. It’s pretty phenomenal it’s taken this long for someone to realise that embracing that could be a bonus. In terms of progress, she’s driving things forward – and if other women feel the same way I do while scrolling through that website, her bottom line will soon be proving the point.