Anything and everything Rihanna does dominates press and social media, but she really set timelines and headlines ablaze Monday morning, with new photos that indicate that she is pregnant with her first child. After months of rumor and speculation, the musician and makeup mogul made her own silent statement over the weekend by walking around with boyfriend ASAP Rocky through his native Harlem, with stomach bared for inquiring eyes.
Pregnancy rumors have constantly swirled around the 33-year-old singer in recent years, and as recently as December 2021 she refuted them in typically witty fashion. “You ain’t came to the first 10 baby showers! Y’all breed me every year dammit,” she wrote in a DM to a fan asking if she could attend Rihanna’s baby shower.
The highly stylish couple both wore excellent ‘fits, Rihanna in a long pink Chanel coat and distressed jeans, with Rocky donning a denim Carhartt jacket and leather pants. (It should be noted this was a frigid, snowy weekend in New York, making the couple’s method of announcing that much more of a flex.)
Rihanna has been candid about her desire to have children, including in a March 2020 Vogue cover story where she said she wanted to have “three or four” kids by the time she was in her early 40s. It’s noteworthy that the pair didn’t do any kind of formal social media announcement, instead opting for the news to spread on its own. Rocky, for his part, told GQ last year that he’d be “an incredible, remarkably overall amazing dad. I would have a very fly child.”
The two superstars have been friends for years, sharing the stage at the VMAs in 2012, touring together the following year, and attending high profile events like Paris Fashion Week even before they were officially together. In his GQ interview, Rocky was asked what it’s like to be in a relationship now and gave a glowing response about how special Rihanna is.
“So much better when you got the One. She amounts to probably, like, a million other ones,” he said. “I think when you know, you know. She’s the One.”
Coincidentally, the photos were released ten years to the day since Rocky recorded “Fashion Killa,” a song connecting romance and designer threads as only he could. The video, directed by Virgil Abloh, enlisted one Robyn Fenty as his shopping date as he rapped lines like “Our babies will be flyer than their parents.” Prophetic.