Rihanna’s religious imagery is a protest against feminine ideals of respectability and decency

Rihanna’s no stranger to causing a stir. This time, she’s attracted controversy and outrage with her “dehumanising and degrading” representation of a nun for the Spring 2024 cover of Interview magazine.

This isn’t Rihanna’s first use of religious imagery in her work, either. Take her “sexy pope” outfit at the 2018 Met Gala, for example. It became an iconic look, since immortalised in a Madame Tussard’s wax work, that inspired Vogue magazine to declare “Rihanna won the Met Gala”.

Like the cover image for Interview magazine, some quarters deemed the Gala theme “heavenly bodies: fashion and the catholic imagination” “sacrilegious”.

But the catholic church partnered with the accompanying Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, lending more than forty papal vestments from the Vatican. The Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, not only sanctioned but also attended the event.

Rihanna hasn’t limited her use of religious symbolism to Christianity, either. In 2021, she was accused of cultural appropriation when she photographed wearing a pendant of the Hindu deity Ganesha.

And the year before, Rihanna apologised for using sacred Islamic text in the music for the 2020 Savage x Fenty lingerie runway show.

Religious symbolism as cultural provocation
Like many high profile pop stars from Beyoncé to Madonna and Lady Gaga to Lil Nas X, Rihanna uses religious imagery as cultural provocation.

Just as Beyoncé used Virgin Mary imagery in her pregnancy announcements to subvert associations between whiteness and sexual purity, Rihanna parodies the “nunsploitation” genre to play with assumptions about the politics of respectability and taste, sexual abstinence and the sexualisation of women.