Let’s get one thing straight: Lizzo is having a moment. I mean, she’s been having a “moment” for what seems like quite a long time now, to the point that it no longer feels appropriate to call it that. Really, she’s just on fire. And it isn’t a flame that seems in danger of being extinguished anytime soon.
Fresh off the heels of gracing the cover of Vogue’s October issue, the Grammy award winner made a literal show-stopping appearance in one of this season’s most anticipated fashion events: Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty show. Rihanna designed multiple sets — “Garden of Eden,” “Dear Diary” — to keep all her models safe and comfortable, so they could show off the garments while safely distanced from each other.
It was a star-studded lineup, with a list of names that easily might have been misinterpreted as a list of performers for some buzzy music festival: Miguel, Travis Scott, Ella Mai, Bad Bunny, Normani.
When Lizzo makes her cameo, she turns out to steal the show. Styled in a monochromatic royal blue getup — lace blue gloves, blue acrylic nails, a blue bra and underwear set, blue fishnet tights — the singer appears and dances some sexy choreography to D’Angelo’s soulful classic, “Brown Sugar.” Two backup dancers, wearing matching blue sets, help support the moment. “Just when you thought I couldn’t love myself any more,” Lizzo wrote in a post after the show.
“I love Lizzo. She’s so badass,” Rihanna told ET Canada last year, admitting her dream of working with the singer some day. “She is everything that Savage stands for: a confident woman, no matter what size, colour, shape.”
The “Savage x Fenty Vol. 2” Fall collection was a logical and exciting continuation of Rihanna’s inclusive vision. When the line first debuted in September 2018, the world seemed to respond well to the brand’s celebration of “fearlessness, confidence and inclusivity.” It blew the airbrushed, narrowly imagined Victoria’s Secret fantasy right out of the water.
“We took that and we said this is going to be the core of what our brand stands for,” Rihanna told Bustle in an interview. “And from now on, we’re just going to keep expanding on the level of inclusivity. Every show has expanded on that, ever since. And this time is going to be nothing different.”
The Fall collection offers sizes ranging from XS to 3X. It featured plus-size models, trans and non-binary stars, and a couple of men modelling the first Savage X Fenty menswear line, made in collaboration with rapper Christian Combs, P. Diddy’s son.
“It is about who gives me what I want to feel,” Rihanna told Vogue of her intentions behind the casting. “I don’t care about size, shape, or colour; I embrace all types of women.”
In her Vogue interview with Claudia Rankine, Lizzo weighed in with her feelings about the body positivity movement, and expressed her efforts to move past that label and toward one that reflects an investment in normalizing all bodies. The problem, she explained, isn’t necessarily the commercialization of the movement, but the way that fatness still hasn’t totally been accepted as normal.
“What I don’t like is how the people that this term was created for are not benefiting from it,” she said. “Girls with back fat, girls with bellies that hang, girls with thighs that aren’t separated, that overlap. Girls with stretch marks. You know, girls who are in the 18-plus club. They need to be benefiting from ... the mainstream effect of body positivity now. But with everything that goes mainstream, it gets changed. It gets — you know, it gets made acceptable.”
Also on HuffPost: