Rihanna loves a show — a splashy late arrival, a “personal news” tease. The pop star arrived at the Met Gala on Rihanna time, around 10 p.m. She looked visibly pregnant.
The night was of course about her partner, ASAP Rocky, who was a co-chair of the gala and arrived earlier in the evening, wearing a suit he said nodded to the film “Harlem Nights.” But it was also about Rihanna in the sense that everything is always about Rihanna.
The pop star set social media atwitter earlier in the day, when she walked into the Carlyle Hotel wearing a gray two piece suit, captured in photos that sparked speculations the singer was pregnant with her third child. Walking up the blue-carpeted steps of the Met, the pop star seemed to confirm the suspicions when she met shouts of congratulations with: “Thank you!”
ASAP Rocky, in an interview Monday night, appeared to add his own confirmation, saying: “I don’t know, whatever, just don’t really cover her baby bump, you dig?”
It wasn’t Rihanna’s first stunt pregnancy reveal. At the 2023 Super Bowl, as the opening notes of her song “Bitch Better Have My Money” sounded, Rihanna stared at the crowd steely-eyed and rubbed her bump, signaling to fans she didn’t have a new album coming but she did have more significant news. In 2022, she announced her first pregnancy with a street shot that showed her in a pink Chanel puffer, her protruding stomach bare aside from a jewel-encrusted cross.
That first Rihanna pregnancy image was part of a tradition, one that included Demi Moore on a then-scandalous 1991 Vanity Fair cover that was banned in some stores, as well as Beyoncé posing pregnant in lingerie in 2017. Rihanna’s portrait, framed by a Harlem streetscape and flurries of snow, launched immediate imitators; “pink padded coat” sales shot up 200 percent.
The message of all these Rihanna announcements is clear: Whether she’s in the middle of a New York street, on a Super Bowl halftime stage or stepping hours late onto a red carpet, the moment waits for Rihanna; after all, she has priorities to attend to, more intimate and also definitively more important than galas, sports and traffic.
The theme of Monday night’s gala was “tailored for you,” a celebration of personal twists on dandy style that ranged from André 3000 with a piano on his back to Stevie Wonder in a bedazzled cape. But the Met Gala is also perpetually an event tailored for Rihanna. In 2018, she made waves in a papal get-up; in 2023, her look verged on walking wedding cake, but glamorous. This year, her absence for hours on the red carpet, and the swirl of rumors surrounding it, said more than any outfit could.
When she finally arrived, she joked with reporters who had been waiting for her: “I can barely wink,” she told them, “but I’ll do it for you.”
