Fenty hasn’t touched a shelf but Rihanna is already setting standards with the brand’s ad campaign.
The mogul has hired 68-year-old model JoAni Johnson to star in the Fenty ad campaign, reports Refinery 29.
Johnson posted several shots from the campaign on her Instagram page and thanked the Fenty Beauty mogul for the opportunity.
“Enormous thanks and love to [Rihanna] (a true visionary!) and LVMH for choosing me to be on the right side of history with you, as unapologetic fashion game-changers,” she wrote.
“Representation matters. It always has and this Fenty campaign is so excellent and so important for multiple reasons in 2019. The marathon certainly continues.”
Johnson became famous after she reluctantly posed a street fashion photo after encouragement from her late husband in 2016. The picture went viral and her modeling career took off.
“I didn’t want to. But my husband said, ‘C’mon, let her take the photo,’” she recalled in February.
Johnson eventually did a video about aging for Allure and the rest is history.
“I asked my husband first and, again, he said, ‘Go ahead, just try it.’ I didn’t know what they wanted,” she continued. “I was semi-retired and working on my tea blending business. But then I went and that was the Allure video.”
After her husband passed away, Johnson had a new motivation.
“All of this is for him,” she said. “My husband was the most wonderful man I could ever imagine. There are so many times that I know that he’s with me. On my last shoot, for example, they put on a song that was something that we used to listen to together — I knew that he was there.”
Johnson’s hiring is just another example of Rihanna’s commitment to diversifying the fashion industry. The “Work” singer admitted she wanted to shake things up with her newest brand, which she plans to release exclusively online.
“I want to be as disruptive as possible,” she told T Magazine. “The brand is not traditional. There is no runway show. It’s a new way of doing things because I believe that this is where fashion is going to go eventually.”
Rihanna traces her appreciation for variety to her childhood and helped her establish her vision for her beauty empire.
“In my own household, my father is half black, half white,” she said. “My mom is black from South America. I was seeing diversity. That’s all I knew.”
Rihanna's Fenty line dropped on Wednesday.
