Rihanna‬ ‪Puma SE‬ ‪Fashion

There are many inner sancta through which you must pass to meet Rihanna.  The overall theme of the event seems to be “extremely small amounts of food, offered very quickly.” I watch as food sails past me and take notes: “They are bringing chicken on a stick. The chicken is not for me.” The majority of attendees appeared to be students from nearby fashion universities, including the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Parsons School of Design.

The cozy West Hollywood boutique space, located a block down from the Kardashians' Dash store and across the street from Diesel and Marc Jacobs, was decorated with black-and-white fixtures that put the mesh headwraps ($50), a terry cloth sweatband choker ($30) and sneaker wedge boots ($350) on full display.

Then around the corner to the store itself, through stockrooms stacked high with sneakers and jerseys, and finally into a room that contains a cash wrap and a throne (presumably, for the deity to rest on between interviews.) Official-looking people with credentials around their necks are waiting, watching their Instagram to chart Rihanna’s progression from Bergdorf Goodman down to the land of the PATH train. In the course of my time at the Herald Square branch of Foot Locker, where she is hosting a pop-up shop for lucky fans to pick up her Fenty Puma collection, I pass through an “experimental” space — Foot Locker as Mies van der Rohe commission, complete with bare bulbs.