Rihannas early image goes along with being a princess of pop like most young stars brought into the pop genre. They use Rihanna's face to take up most of her early album cover to establish her image and give girls who would be her main audience someone to look up to. In her earliest videos she is established as being quite fun with in Pon de reply video her starting up the dancing in her jeans and a cropped top. Although parts of the video do show Rihanna dancing in a tight dress where she does look quite sexy it's not the point of the video.Rihanna's image does change later in her career as in the unfaithful video she plays a character of a women having an affair. This character in the video allows us as an audience to see Rihanna as more womenly even though she's not playing herself.
We also see her as more sexy as she is wearing a tight black dress which reveals some of her lace bra, then we see her sitting on the side of the bed in a mans shirt giving connotations that her character has slept with the man. In this video she appears as a sexy mature women rather than the pretty girl in Pon de Reply. The videos do contain performance but normally along with a slight narrative.There are close ups of Rihanna throughout her work although the reasons for these may change. In the stars first videos the close ups of the star are probaly to establish her image, make her recognisable and also giving the fans someone to look up to.
Where as the close ups in videos like unfaithful show the star with quite sexual facial expression, go along with the narrative to show emotions and also give the fans what they want in seeing lots of the star. The record company now try and sell the star by showing her as not only a sexy but a strong powerful women aswell. Rihanna's changing her style and costumes have a big impact on this. Many say Rihanna became much sexier when she cut off her long hair, the extremely short styles have become quite iconic to the stars image. The costumes worn also impact her image with her having just a leather jacket on half zipped with nothing underneath, with the leather jacket being slightly masculine and powerful and the way she is wearing it making it sexy.The camera work and editing are used to amplify the stars image. The camera uses
close up shots to draw our attention to the way the stars make up has been done to with things like smokey eyes to make her seem more sexual. They also use long shots so we can see the costume of Rihanna and her dancing to sexualise her body in many of the videos.I consider the wider cultural significance of Rihanna is how strong she is and the fact she is a good role model to women everywhere. An example of this is after Rihanna got beaten up by rapper boyfriend Chris Brown and followed through with the court case and leaving him, this showed many fans her strength and independance.
I feel that Rihanna has been around for quite a while as she has grown up with many of her fans and has adapted to the changes in the type of mainstream music rather than sticking to just squeaky clean pop. Rihanna is now seen as one of the most sexy women in industry and plays on this in her videos by wearing more revealing outfits.
