The Gospel of Fenty Gold

Rihanna dropped a new Fenty Beauty campaign and the photos are gold—literally, and in every other sense. She has always understood that gold is the only color scaled to what she actually is, which is something that sits comfortably outside the usual vocabulary for human beauty. Looking at these images for too long starts to feel like a theological problem.

Rihanna’s physical presence in photographs does something I genuinely can’t rationalize. It’s not just beauty, though the beauty is total. It’s more like density—the sense that the image contains more than images normally contain, that there’s something in there that wouldn’t diminish no matter how long you kept looking. The Fenty shoots understand this. They don’t ask her to be decorative. They let her be overwhelming.

If the universe has a face—and I’m not saying it does, but if—it probably looks something like this. Chisel it into stone. Cast it in lead. Pour it in gold and put it somewhere prominent. Attend to it twice a day like a rational person making rational choices about what deserves devotion. When future civilizations comb through the rubble of our cities and find the images we made of Rihanna, they will understand immediately what we valued at our best. They will be correct. They will build altars of their own.

The Fenty enterprise—beauty, lingerie, perfume—has the coherence of an artist who knows exactly what she’s projecting and has never made an accidental decision. Even the shots that look effortless are effortless the way great architecture is effortless: because someone made ten thousand careful decisions before anyone else got near it.

Somewhere there is a person being paid to point a camera at Rihanna and press a button. That is unambiguously the best job in the world, and I will never forgive them for having it.