Rihanna: ‘I refused to buy maternity clothes’

“I was like, whatever fits is going to work, and that made me challenge myself to get clever with style,” she added.

She was speaking at the launch party of her latest collaboration with Puma.

The multi-Grammy Award winner has two sons with rapper A$AP Rocky – RZA Athelaston Mayers, born in 2022, and Riot Rose Mayers, born in 2023.

“Then I got too comfortable after I had my second kid and I was in robes, pyjamas and sweats. Now I’m playing [live] again and enjoying my clothes.”

The singer added that only in recent weeks has she had “a rediscovery” of herself, after focusing on raising two children under two.

“Being able to allow myself mentally to have that space to approach my closet and create stuff – after you have kids, it does something for you as a woman and as a mum, and that’s really important,” she said.

She has been praised for changing the narrative around maternity style, with Vanessa Friedman writing in The New York Times that she “has a history of consciously using her own physicality and profile to force reconsideration of old prejudices and social conventions about female agency and beauty”.

Many of her looks, both during and post pregnancy, have given a nod to high fashion, but have been described in Glamour as “accessible” due to the use of everyday outfits.

“She is pushing the concept of what a pregnancy wardrobe can include,” The Bump’s Ashlee Neuman told the Guardian in 2022.

“Up until now, crop tops, low rise jeans and sheer fabrics haven’t been a mainstay of maternity wear.”