Wrong Shoes, Right World

The Fenty Creeper—that chunky, thick-soled platform shoe that looked like it had crawled out of 1996 and decided to run for mayor—should not have worked as well as it did. It sold out immediately when Rihanna’s collaboration with Puma launched, won shoe of the year in 2016, and managed to make a sportswear brand that had been coasting on nostalgia feel genuinely current again. Rihanna as creative director is basically a guarantee that whatever she touches will be more interesting than what the brand would have done without her. She has the taste that doesn’t need justification.

What Fenty x Puma built across its run was a coherent aesthetic: overtly feminine silhouettes in oversized proportions, equal parts athletic and theatrical, as interested in the look as in the wear. The Bow Slides. The follow-up Creeper variants in different materials and colourways. The apparel. Each piece felt considered rather than iterative. It looked like a teenager’s vision of what luxury sportswear should feel like—and it was right.

Most celebrity fashion lines are aspirational in a defensive way: here’s what I wear, presumably you’d like to as well. Fenty x Puma was aspirational the way a good music video is—you weren’t expected to become her, just to want to live in the world she was constructing. When the collection expanded in 2017 and got a Berlin pop-up to match, that made sense for a city that takes its sneaker culture seriously. By then the Creeper had already done what it needed to do: proved that Rihanna’s instincts in fashion were as good as in music, and that Puma was capable of being interesting again.