Disney and fairytale romance conditioning is strong. Like I wonder if I’ll ever be fully rid of it. Not that A$AP Rocky and Rihanna are anything resembling a conventional fairytale but this declaration, this trope of the player who falls in love and finds the one… it’s irresistible. And because it’s these two, it’s a total swoon. I am 16 right now, squealing over this, over them. And I don’t think I’m alone. Sasha texted me earlier with a skull emoji – she’s also dead from intoxication and Rocky and Rihanna obsession.
This is all coming out of Rocky’s newGQ cover story:
First of all… MY GOD this look. I can’t with how beautiful he is. You know that movie,The King,starring Timothee Chalamet? Remake it right now with Rocky.
It has been a year for so many people around the world. For Rocky, it’s been TWO. Rocky was one of the biggest stories in pop culture two summers ago when he was held in a Swedish prison for a month. As noted in the GQ piece, this is an artist who is constantly in motion, so to be incarcerated, alone, in a foreign country, obviously it would have been a lot to process. In the interview, Rocky doesn’t get too deep into what was probably a dark time, focusing instead on how he chose to be productive. Amazingly, there’s a fashion line that came out of that experience and because of those weeks in jail, he may actually have been more equipped, emotionally, to handle 2020, as the pandemic disrupted all our plans.
But of course you can’t come out of a situation like that totally unchanged. We’ll get to how that change had an impact on his love life in a minute but this piece is also about how Rocky started the process of getting to know who he is, introducing himself to himself, when he was in Sweden, and the continuation of that process ever since. So it’s no surprise that even though Rocky and Rihanna have known each other for years, it was only after his release that they took their relationship to another level.
After breaking up with Chanel Iman in 2014 and prior to getting serious with Rihanna, Rocky was not known for monogamy…which is an understatement. Yet for at least a year and a half now, that we know of, it’s been only Rihanna for Rocky, and now here he is in GQ, speaking about it openly for the first time.
“The love of my life,” he calls her. “My lady.”
As for being in a committed relationship:
“好多了,”洛基毫不犹豫地回答. “So much better when you got the One. She amounts to probably, like, a million of the other ones.” New-world shit, indeed. Rocky is among our culture's most unabashed ladies' men, but he says he's comfortable embracing monogamy: “I think when you know, you know. She's the One.”
The writer, Samuel Hine, describes Rocky’s demeaner about Rihanna “like a teenager whose crush just accepted his prom invite. I could practically hear the angels singing.”
See what I mean about conditioning and swooning? I should be more jaded and cynical, I should be more objective when it comes to celebrities and love, but I can’t help myself. Not when these words are accompanied with visuals. Check out Rocky revisiting some of his past looks and right off the top, he’s making this more about Rihanna than himself.
I mean obviously I see what he sees in her because… Rihanna. But right there you get a sense of what she sees in him. He’s ADORABLE.
Rocky doesn’t go into too much more detail about their relationship, but he does reveal that they spent part of the pandemic on a road trip, in a trailer, travelling from one side of the United States to the other – not because of work, not stopping to perform, but just going from stop to stop in their bus, exploring the country and, probably, each other. And themselves. Rocky recorded music on the trip, he worked on his design ideas, and it’s implied that much of his new album,All Smiles,was written during or at least inspired by their love haze. It’s also implied that Rihanna was also working on her sound while they were travelling… so whenever it is that she’s ready to drop her album (she will not be rushed, LOL), we might see how they influenced each other.
In more ways than one. Rihanna is fashion. Rocky is also fashion. Much of this article is about his fashion eye, about how he interprets style and his style vision. Rihanna and Rocky, then, are clearly deeply connected through their art. I love that Rocky is the kind of person who can remember what everyone was wearing at a dinner or a party from ten years ago. And he has great taste which you can see in his collaborationwith designer Marine Serre, a collection he worked on while he was jailed in Sweden. He sketched out some designs, with Marine Serre’s aesthetic in mind, and then flew to Paris to meet with her shortly after he was sprung to discuss the possibility, at which point she found out that he could actually stitch and understands material and construction.
Marine Serre is no joke. One of the best fashion investments I’ve ever made is a Marine Serre piece – and since we’ve been mentioning humblebrags today, let me join the party: back in 2017 she was one of the featured artist at Nordstrom Toronto’s space lab and I could not walk away from this jumpsuit!
I’m telling you – a decade from now this is going to be a collector’s item. Humblebrag over. But seriously, if I could I would buy Marine Serre everything. The label’s website is where I go to dream. Look atthis cape. Andthis hoodie blouse. I would also like one ofthese bags.
So anyway, to go back to Rocky, this collaboration was a flex. Like Rihanna, he has an eye. Which only adds to the allure of this relationship. Of course, yes, Rihanna is the bigger name by most measures in terms of worldwide recognition. But Rocky isn’t the ARod in this situation. They’re actually really well matched – in music cred and fashion cred and cool cred and beauty cred …
Rihanna doesn’t need Rocky. Rocky doesn’t need Rihanna either. Together though, like name another Power Couple you’re more excited about?
