After Rihanna announced she was expecting her first child back in 2021, she decided to commemorate her pregnancy not with sepia-toned portraits of her and partner A$AP Rocky holding an ultrasound photo, but with a Vogue photographed by Annie Leibovitz. Her bump, memorably, was the star of the show as she posed in a completely sheer Alaïa bodysuit.
Now her first child, a baby boy the couple welcomed last May, is almost 10 months old, and he’s back in front of Vogue’s lens, appearing alongside his mama in British Vogue’s March cover (see all the photos, by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, here). Oh, and Rocky makes an appearance in the pics too.
RiRi and Rocky have yet to publicly announce the name of their son, and instead, per writer Giles Hattersley, Rihanna refers to him as simply “baby” during their time together. But to her credit, Rihanna has been busy. In addition to raising said baby, she released two new songs for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, headlined the 2023 Super Bowl Halftime Show, and announced her second pregnancy.
“Oh, my God, it’s legendary,” she told British Vogue of motherhood. “It’s everything. You really don’t remember life before, that’s the craziest thing ever…You literally try to remember it—and there are photos of my life before—but the feeling, the desires, the things that you enjoy, everything, you just don’t identify with it because you don’t even allow yourself mentally to get that far,” she continued. “Because it doesn’t matter.”
The 35-year-old also recalled the experience taking her baby boy home for the first time, and the creeping anxiety that accompanies new parenthood. “You’re so paranoid,” she said. “Because you’re like: They trusted us to come home with this baby? This new life? With us?”
Of course, with a new pregnancy comes new maternity wear—a genre of clothing Rihanna basically reinvented during her first go-around. Unrelatably, she says that dressing a pregnant body is as effortless as she made it seem.
“Dressing for pregnancy was such a piece of cake,” she said. It’s what comes after that’s hard, she maintained: “But dressing in postpartum, what the fuck do you do? The week that I came home from the hospital—that was nothing but sweats and hoodies. But the weeks after that, you don’t know what to put on. Everything is too small or too big.”
She continued, “You kind of just gotta wait it out otherwise you end up buying so many clothes you’re not going to use. Well, unless you get pregnant again.”
