Rihanna Covers HARPER’s BAZAAR March 2025 ‘Legacy’ Issue

Pin

Rihanna sat down with Harper’s BAZAAR US Executive Digital Director Lynette Nylander for an intimate conversation about motherhood, her passion for her many businesses, her new gig as the new face of Dior’s marquee fragrance, J’adore and where she wants to take her music next: “This feels right. It feels like it digs right into where I need to be, and I want this. This body needs to come out, and I’m ready to go there. This is becoming my new freedom, because when I’m in the studio, I know that my time away from my kids is to blossom something that hasn’t been watered in eight years. I’ve been in the studio the whole eight years. But it didn’t hit me. I was searching for it. I went through phases of what I wanted to do. ‘This kind of album, not that album.’ I know it’s not going to be anything that anybody expects. And it’s not going to be commercial or radio, digestible. It’s going to be where my artistry deserves to be right now. I feel like I’ve finally cracked it, girl!”

Rihanna also opens up about home life with partner A$AP Rocky and their two sons, RZA and Riot, why she doesn’t let being a celebrity dictate how she lives her life, her post-partum style and what legacy means to her: “Getting old is s**t, but it’s also a blessing. My legacy is right now. That’s all I have the most control over. There’s things I have no control over. My legacy is what I do with my time at this moment. How am I present with the people around me? How am I grateful? How am I making this a happy moment? How am I making a memory? I’m even in the space of not even spending my money on things, but I’ll spend my money on an experience. That’s something no one can take from me. Somebody could rob me right now of everything I have, [but] they will never take a memory, an experience, a feeling, a scent that reminded me of that moment. There’s just things that mean more when you grow up.”

Pin

Pin

Rihanna on surveying an adolescence spent in the spotlight: “I had a lot of doubts. Actually, after Music of the Sun … doubt grew every album. You actually think you have to have a number-one album to be successful or to think you made it. You feel like you failed if your album became anything less than number one. That was the era of music at that time.”

“I’ve always been afraid of how much is me versus what I’ve been influenced by,” she says of the trajectory of her career. “I left home as a teenager, and I left everything I knew: my family, my friends, my food, my culture. And I came to a big city by myself, and the only option for me was to win. I knew that I had to win. The suffering that I felt not being a part of anything that I knew, there was only one way to make that worth it, because I knew that my family was suffering without me too. And so I was like, ‘There’s no way. This has to pay off.’ And that was my fight, my goal, my everything. Every single day.”

On revisiting her last album, 2016’s Anti and how it reinforced where she wants to take her music next: “I listen to Anti from top to bottom with no shame,” she says. “I used to always have shame. I actually don’t like listening to my music, but Anti—I can listen to the album. It’s not me singing it, if I’m just listening to it. That’s the one album that I can have an out-of-body experience where it’s not like … You know when you hear your voice in a voicemail, and it’s like, ‘Ugh.’ ” The time with her music reinforced where she wants to take it next. “I think music is my freedom. I just came to that realization. I just cracked the code on what I really want to do for my next body of work.”

On debunking the rumors on the stylistic direction of R9, the fan name given to her long-awaited record and why it’s not a reggae album: “Way off! There’s no genre now. That’s why I waited. Every time, I was just like, ‘No, it’s not me. It’s not right. It’s not matching my growth. It’s not matching my evolution. I can’t do this. I can’t stand by this. I can’t perform this for a year on tour.’ After a while, I looked at it, and I was like, this much time away from music needs to count for the next thing everyone hears. It has to count. It has to matter. I have to show them the worth in the wait. I cannot put up anything mediocre. After waiting eight years, you might as well just wait some more.”

Rihanna on her kids, RZA and Riot: “RZA is just an empath,” Rihanna explains. “He’s so magical. He loves music. He loves melody. He loves books. He loves water. Bath time, swimming, pool, beach, anything. And Riot, he’s just hilarious. When he wakes up, he starts to squeal, scream. Not in a crying way. He just wants to sing. And I’m like, ‘Okay, here we go!’ He’s my alarm in the morning! He’s not taking no for an answer from anyone. I don’t know where he came from, dude,” she adds, describing a boisterous personality that, from observation, doesn’t seem unlike her own. “Don’t say that. Wait until you meet him!” Riot’s name came courtesy of Pharrell Williams, who worked with A$AP Rocky on Rocky’s 2023 song of the same name. “He gave us this name thinking it was going to be a girl, because he had seen something online. Pharrell is very deep. He’s not surface. He will never say anything and just leave it there with a full stop. He will have the entire history: the energy, the time, the month that it is.” She explains RZA struggled with the introduction of a baby brother, “like all [new] siblings do, and at first Riot was understanding that his role was being the little brother. Now he knows he’s in charge.”

Rihanna on how the “greatest thing” about Rocky “is seeing him be a dad”: “His pureness. His charm. I’m annoyed because my sons sometimes just live for him more than they live for me,” she says. “And I’m like, ‘Did you know who cooked you? Do you know who pushed you out?’ And they love him, but when I see it, oh, it’s the best.”

On how she is still figuring out where her postpartum style fits in her new reality: “I feel like getting dressed is a fight on its own [now],” Rihanna explains. “Everything is so … logical. What makes sense? What’s easy? What’s fast? I try not to overthink all that stuff, but you’re leaving the house. It kind of stops you from going out. How much energy do I have to put into getting ready? Doing my makeup, doing my hair, and then going to the closet and figuring out which three things in this entire room make sense together? You go through a fog. And fashion is so much fun, and I miss the fun.”

Rihanna acknowledges that she is “starting to have fun again” when it comes to getting dressed. “Now I’m starting to just remember what I loved about it: the juxtaposition, putting the things together that don’t make sense. My fashion has always been driven by my mood, and my mood was on mom mode for a minute.”

On how she doesn’t let being a celebrity dictate how she lives her life: “We like to eat with people. We like to shop with people. We like to walk the streets with people. I don’t like a private room. I don’t have them shut down stores. I don’t like the Rapunzel life. It’s very isolating. It’s very lonely. And what am I protecting myself from? I’m actually allowing people to dictate the robbery of the life that I could actually be living.”

On her newest role as the face of Dior’s storied fragrance J’adore: “My first introduction to J’adore Dior was my mom. My mom used to sell perfume at a duty-free store. She would come home with the testers when they were down to the end and they have to put out a new tester. J’adore was one of those ones that were always there. And that’s where my love for J’adore started.”

On the passion Rihanna has for her many businesses and wanting to do home design and furniture: “I care because my name is on it,” she says. “I don’t want my name to represent anything that I didn’t stand for.” In addition to all things Fenty Beauty, which she launched in 2017 and which has branched out into skincare and hair care, she has expanded her popular Savage X Fenty line and relaunched Fenty x Puma, her collaboration with the sportswear giant that had previously been on hiatus since 2018. And if Rihanna keeps going, there’s more: “I want to do furniture. Home design.” I suggest wine perhaps, a nod to the meme-worthy paparazzi photos of her carrying wineglasses from the dinner table home with her. “You know what?” she contemplates. “I think I’ll do wine later in my life. Because I respect the art of it all, and we would want to have our own family vineyard.”

On why people believe what she’s selling in her businesses: “You know what? I’ve never underestimated the consumer. I think a lot of people underestimate the consumer. They think that they can maybe pull the wool over the consumer’s eyes and sell them what the ideal of beauty should be. And I don’t know if it’s the era of social media or just time, but people are not dumb. People are not blind to what’s happening. They understand the marketing; they understand the strategy. They know when you’re being fake.”

On how her kids impact every decision, suffering from self-guilt and trying to figure out a balance: “Every decision I make revolves around them, but everything that I do that I love robs me from them,” she says. “So I have a weird resentment with the things that I love. You almost feel like something is always suffering for you to show up somewhere. And even when you show up there, it’s not 100 percent because there’s something else on the wheel. It’s actually given me a lot more self-guilt. I don’t like letting people down, but I also know that most of that is me letting myself down, which means something has to change, but everything is on the wheel at all times. I have to keep reminding myself that I asked for this, I love this. I try to figure out a balance so that I can feel fulfilled when I show up to something, so I can feel I don’t have any guilt.”

Photographer: Luis Alberto Rodriguez
Stylist: Carlos Nazario
Hair: Yusef for Fenty Hair
Makeup: Priscilla Ono
Manicure: Kim Truong for Aprés Nail

[Photo Credit: Luis Alberto Rodriguez for Harper’s Bazaar Magazine]

• Carlos Nazario
• Editorials
• Harper’s Bazaar
• Luis Alberto Rodriguez
• Magazines
• Priscilla Ono
• Rihanna
• Yusef