Rihanna is having a tough week; she’s been labeled a “cyber bully” after one of her followers – Alexis Carter, a 16-year-old Baltimore teen – home-made a Rihanna-inspired dress to wear to her Hollywood-themed prom. The dress, which was inspired by the singer’s infamous winged green jump suit from a Berlin awards event in 2010, was a handcrafted black version that, according to the youngster, went down well at her prom. “Everybody was saying, ‘Oh my god, I love it, it looks nice, your body looks good, it’s different,’” she reportedly said.
Rihanna is continuing her mean-girl ways on another social media platform, despite her Instagram sabbatical.
As a celebrity, you must pick whether you will completely control yourself in order to be the nice, role model-type, or you will be completely yourself and make fun of stuff on social media because that is what you believe it is for. Rihanna is one celebrity who has clearly chosen the latter. She lets it all hang out (literally and figuratively) on the internet, including poking fun of admirers’ strange fashion choices.
Photos of the inspired jumpsuit surfaced on the internet, and they quickly went viral, bringing a slew of online trolls to crawl out of their bunkers and compare the garment to a bat, with some furious #PromBat hashtagging thrown in for good measure.
Rihanna mocked the 16-year- old’s “prom bat” attire as well. Now, I understand that a “prom bat” attire seems like it should be mocked, but Rihanna went really beyond with this one. Especially when the fan was dressed almost identically to Rihanna in the past.
Rihanna may be receiving a CFDA Fashion Icon award in June and being designated an icon at the American Music Awards, but it doesn’t mean she’s the most friendly role model.
The Diamonds singer went to the trouble of arranging the photos side by side (above) with the caption “”. Not cool, Ri, not cool at all.
As if her initial twitter jab wasn’t severe enough, she followed up with another, this time tweeting Alexis’ prom photo alongside a photo of the bat-like Wu Tang insignia and the remark “she gets it.” We have no idea what the second caption means, but we can’t think it was anything but embarrassing for a 16-year-old to be mocked by your idol (or former idol) of all people on Twitter.
Carter believed it would be ideal for her prom, which had a Hollywood theme.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, I love this outfit, I wanna go with this outfit let me go show my mom,’ and I was like, ‘Mom, mom, mom, I wanna wear this, it’s cool, I love it, oh my god,’” Carter told Baltimore’s WBFF-TV. A family friend then created the look.
Is that the greatest option for a pose? Most likely not. And if her friends had spoken to her in person, “Oooh, girl! You look like a bat, you should stop posing like that.” She would have probably laughed it off and moved on. Unfortunately, we live in a terrible world where people grab other people’s images and put them on Twitter with the caption “I look like the Wu Tang symbol” (appropriate, but come on you guys), and even worse for Carter, the person she was copying joined in on it.
“I was very offended. Why throw shade on it when you had on the exact same thing? The poses was different but the outfit wasn’t,” Carter told Fox Baltimore. “She don’t love her fans like she says she does.”
Do we consider this to constitute cyberbullying? Should Rihanna have a responsibility to either support or ignore her fans’ outfits if she thinks they’re hideous?
Carter claims she is still receiving unpleasant remarks and cyberbullying as a result of her attire, and she is disappointed with Rihanna’s behavior.
