Savage X Fenty Show,” on Amazon Prime Video, is an infomercial for an underpants brand.
It is also a charming diversion and an estimable pseudo-event—a see-now-buy-now spectacular for the society of spectacle.
It is a logical brand extension for its creator, Robyn Rihanna Fenty.
And it is a natural flowering of a culture that has given us Madonna’s “Truth or Dare,” David Fincher and Paula Abdul’s interpretation of Bob Fosse’s choreography, Beyoncé’s autobiography on HBO, and all of QVC.
To say that it puts the prettiest possible face on end-phase capitalism is to respect its game.
It plays like an awards show for itself, but a super-fun one, so I recommend it to oldsters as a window to see what is going in music-centered youth culture without having to wade through the clutter and noise of the MTV Video Music Awards.
The fifty-minute film begins with RiRi’s mission statement—“inclusivity” (in terms of the sizing of the garment and the vision of the customer) and “empowerment” are the key words. We get fifteen minutes of behind-the-scenes prologue to the show, which happened last week, at the Barclays Center, in Brooklyn. The deft editing flows us from conference call to slide presentation to 3 a.m. creative meetings at a pace that induces jet lag.
“It’s all me as the muse,” Rihanna says, sounding well-adjusted. She turns up onscreen as a brand manager, a quality-control supervisor, a creative leader, and a pinup model, while teasing enough of her personality to offer a shimmer of emotional intimacy. Even the bits where she is obviously pretending to do low-level tasks are cute. She catches a skeptical glance from an employee for a minor faux pas when, for some reason, she is coloring the trim of a thong with a permanent marker and slips her pen upon the model still wearing it.
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