See Rihanna’s Jaw-Dropping Super Bowl Halftime Show
Rihanna did it. The singer’s 13-minute Super Bowl Halftime Show just wrapped and it had everything: all her best songs! Spirited dancing! And a vocal powerhouse performance. She even announced her second pregnancy while on stage.
Footage immediately surfaced on Twitter, along with her official set list:
She was aptly dressed head-to-toe in red for the performance, wearing a Loewe look, custom Alaïa coats, and sneakers by MM6 Maison Margiela x Salomon Cross.
Ahead of the show, Rihanna spoke about why she chose to perform at the halftime show less than a year after she gave birth to her first child with her boyfriend A$AP Rocky. “It feels like it could have only been now,” she said during her pre-Super Bowl Apple Music interview. “I mean, when I first got the call to do it again this year, I was like, ‘Psst, you sure?’ I’m three months postpartum, like, should I be making major decisions like this now? Like I might regret this. But when you become a mom, there’s something that just happens where you feel like you could take on the world, you could do anything. And the Super Bowl is one of the biggest stages in the world. So as scary as that was because I haven’t been on stage in seven years, there’s something exhilarating about the challenge of it all. And it’s important for me to do this this year. It’s important for representation, it’s important for my son to see that.”
Rihanna said that she and her team really struggled to finalize the set list for her show. “That was the hardest, hardest part—deciding how to maximize 13 minutes but also celebrate,” she said, via Billboard. “That’s what this show’s gonna be. It’s gonna be a celebration of my catalog in the best way that we could have put it together. You’re trying to cram 17 years of work into 13 minutes…but I think we did a pretty good job of narrowing it down. There were probably about 39 version of the setlist right now. We’re on our 39th. Every little change counts, whether I want a guitar cut out, something muted, something added or just put in a whole new song, or take out a whole song.” The results, above, show that they struck that balance perfectly.
Senior News and Strategy Editor
Alyssa Bailey is the senior news and strategy editor at ELLE.com, where she oversees coverage of celebrities and royals (particularly Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton). She previously held positions at InStyle and Cosmopolitan. When she’s not working, she loves running around Central Park, making people take #ootd pics of her, and exploring New York City.