Rihanna for T Magazine 'The Great Issue'

T Mag features Rihanna as one of the 6 creative greats of ‘ The Greats’, which also includes Karl Lagerfeld, Karl Lagerfeld, Jonathan Franzen and Steve McQueen.

Here is a precepts from her interview with Mirand July:

On Her Instagram:

‘‘You have a special body. Nothing you can Google applies to you.’’ I asked her what kind of apps she had on her phone and she mentioned something called Squaready.

‘‘It helps you put an image with any dimensions in the square box on Instagram.’’

‘‘So you do your Instagram yourself?’’

‘‘Yeah, yeah. That’s the only way it’ll actually work. My fans can sniff the BS from very far away. I cannot trick them.’’

On Men:

‘‘Guys need attention,’’ she explained. ‘‘They need that nourishment, that little stroke of the ego that gets them by every now and then. I’ll give it to my family, I’ll give it to my work — but I will not give it to a man right now.’’

On race:

‘‘You know, when I started to experience the difference or even have my race be highlighted it was mostly when I would do business deals.’’

Meaning that everyone’s cool with a young black woman singing, dancing, partying and looking hot, but that when it comes time to negotiate, to broker a deal, she is suddenly made aware of her blackness.

‘‘And, you know, that never ends, by the way. It’s still a thing. And it’s the thing that makes me want to prove people wrong. It almost excites me; I know what they’re expecting and I can’t wait to show them that I’m here to exceed those expectations.’’ She sounded like a young black professional trying to make it in the corporate world, and I guessed she was — just on a very different scale.

‘‘But I have to bear in mind,’’ she continued, looking right at the voice recorder, ‘‘that those people are judging you because you’re packaged a certain way they’ve been programmed to think a black man in a hoodie means grab your purse a little tighter. For me, it comes down to smaller issues, scenarios in which people can assume something of me without knowing me, just by my packaging.’’

On Coming to West Africa:

‘‘You know what? If I ever go to West Africa, it would probably be for a free concert.’’ Rihanna’s slight Barbadian accent was familiar to me now. ‘‘I would want to do something for the people there. Maybe we can make a whole event, the way Bob Marley would have done it. Just for the people. And if they climb over the gate, let them climb over the gate.’’

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This is a feature by Jumia Nigeria