Representation of women - Rihanna

I have been doing some research into the representation of women within the music industry and have noticed patterns with certain artists such as Rihanna and Nicki Minaj, for example. A brief explanation of how this pattern goes is by the artist starting off as a normal girl, then becoming more sexualised to gain attention, then dressing or acting weirdly to gain more attention. Once that big amount of attention has been gained the artist will then start to tone down. This is because now that they have made a name for themselves they can start to act and dress how they really want too.

Here is Rihanna's transformation...


1st stage

Rihanna came into the music industry with her first album 'Music of the Sun'. As you can tell by this image Rihanna looked like a youthful and innocent girl. She didn't neccessarily have anything about her that stood out apart from the fact that she is pretty. At this point her image would have been simple because she wouldn't have had the money to portray an outstanding character.









2nd stage

Then, when her second album came out 'Good Girl Gone Bad' we can start to see how she has started to become more sexualised. This is so people will stop seeing her as this young and innocent girl and they will start to see her as a sexy woman. In this image we can see the outline of her body which means she wants people to notice her curves and womanly figure. In comparison to her first album cover we can see the the image is much more proffesional. Now that she has become noticed she has more money to portray a prestige image.





3rd stage

This is the stage where Rihanna had to do something big in order to get herself noticed. She decided to dye her hair in a vibrant red colour. This seemed to really work because once she had dyed her hair red, so many girls also started to dye their hair red. At this point Rihanna was also doing things like smoking weed and this was drawing media attention towards her.










After a while the red hair hype started to calm down so then she needed to change her image again in order for people stay entertained. The next thing she did was cut her hair into a pixie cut. Frankie from 'The Saturday's even cut her hair like this. By this point Rihanna had made a name for herself, she is now very famous and is known by everyone.












4th stage


Now that Rihanna has done her job of becoming noticed she has started to tone down her image.  Previously, it used to be her hair that gained a lot of attention where as now she has her hair back to her natural colour and longer length. Today, she gets noticed for her fashion and she has gone into the modelling industry but she hasn't done anything extreme recently to stand out.