Rihanna Casts JoAni Johnson, a Stunning 68-Year-Old Model, in Her Fenty Campaign
After making her inclusive mark on the beauty and lingerie markets-the former with a 40-shade foundation line, and the latter with a nearly unprecedented range of sizes-Rihanna was bound to upend the staid fashion world with Fenty, her new fashion house at LVMH. And in her first campaign, she's doing just that.
Alongside several other models of color-itself a statement in the decidedly-not-diverse fashion space-Rihanna cast JoAni Johnson. Johnson is one of the most exciting up-and-coming faces out there. She also happens to be 68 years old.
Johnson used to work in the fashion world, albeit never as a model, a few decades back. She'd since been out of the game for awhile, but after an Allure video of her hair went viral, that all changed. She was soon walking runways for Tome, starring in Pyer Moss campaigns, and generally taking over.
All this made her the perfect face for Fenty, a brand that favors multiplicity over singularity. "As Luxury has been defined in the past as one woman, one brand: You know who the Saint Laurent woman is, you understood who the Céline woman was when it was Phoebe," Jahleel Weaver, a stylist for Rihanna and Fenty's style director, explained to T Magazine.
"Which is fine, but you think about how that relates to the modern woman. I don’t think she is just one thing, Rih being the perfect example of that." Or as Rihanna herself puts it, "I want to be as disruptive as possible."
For her part, Johnson isn't particularly concerned with these arbitrary boundaries. As she recently told Refinery29, "I consider myself timeless."
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