Rihanna Steals the Attention at London Fashion Week

The big news this London Fashion Week was supposed to be the return of Tom Ford to the runway, the London debut of L’Wren Scott (complete with a dinner Sunday night at the Cafe Royale co-hosted by her boyfriend, Mick Jagger), the buzz surrounding such rising stars as Christopher Kane and JW Anderson and the emergence of the young British model Cara Delevingne as “the next Kate Moss.”

But for the thousands of young fans who packed New Oxford Street in central London on Saturday night, there was only one fashion designer who mattered this week: Rihanna.

The pop signer unveiled her first collection for the British retailer River Island — for which the British press has reported she is being paid roughly $1.2 million — at a cavernous club space jammed with revelers, a few curious members of the fashion press and the occasional local celebrity (including Ms. Delevingne, who sat in the front row).

Mingling among the heavily female crowd during the hourlong wait for the show to begin (a wait made somewhat easier by the small army of waiters passing out glasses of Champagne), it felt at times more like a girls-night-out than a fashion show, with much of the overheard conversations being of last night’s date or last week’s breakup and almost no one talking about whether they would make it to Preen the next morning at 9.

As the crowd milled around, clearly interested in what Rihanna would show but perhaps even more interested in the after-party, a black-and-white film, projected on the wall behind the bar, showed on a continuous loop, with Rihanna apparently talking of the inspirations for her fashion line. I say “apparently” because the sound was turned off and you couldn’t hear a word she was saying.

The runway, a multilevel set of platforms, resembled, appropriately, a concert stage and the models strutted out to the accompaniment of rap songs of which roughly every third word is unpublishable here. The clothes were body-hugging and flesh-baring with even the modest cover-ups featuring some elements of see-through design. (You were expecting subtle?)

At the end, Rihanna came out in a form-fitting black minidress with her costume designer, Adam Selman, and flashed a quick, sly $1.2-million smile.

source:NYtimes

Tags: adam selman, fashion week, London, Rihanna

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