Lui Knew What It Was Doing

If you have any interest in Rihanna’s pierced nipples against a saturated background—and I would argue that interest is both reasonable and well-catered-for here—the French magazine Lui had you covered with their May 2014 issue. Mario Sorrenti shot it, which explains why the whole thing looks less like a men’s magazine cover and more like something that belongs on a gallery wall. Sorrenti has a gift for making nudity feel inevitable rather than performed, like the clothes were just the last thing anyone thought of.

Rihanna—Barbados’s most devoted umbrella enthusiast, international pop force, woman who has never once in her career appeared to give a damn what anyone thought of her choices—is an ideal subject for this kind of shoot. She has a physical confidence that photographs as something close to indifference. Not cold. Just settled. She’s not trying to convince you of anything. She’s just there, on the other side of the image, while you sit with whatever that does to you.

The shoot ran in Lui’s early issues after the magazine was relaunched, and it had the desired effect—which was to establish that a revived French erotic magazine featuring one of the most photographed women alive, shot by one of the best photographers working in this register, is going to move copies. That math isn’t complicated. Neither, honestly, is the appeal. Sometimes a thing is exactly what it appears to be, and that’s not a criticism.