Rihanna’s FENTY and PUMA partnership has reportedly come to a quiet end. According to Business of Fashion, the revived collaboration, which officially relaunched in March 2023 following her Super Bowl Halftime performance, was structured as a three-year contract that has now run its natural course. The deal will not be renewed. The exit closes a second chapter in one of modern sneaker culture’s most culturally consequential celebrity partnerships, and opens a question the entire industry is now asking: where does Rihanna go from here?
The first clue arrived not in a press release but on a New York City sidewalk. Paparazzi caught Rihanna wearing a pair of Jacquemus x Nike Moon Shoes, a direct competitor’s product, in a public setting that made the implicit announcement without requiring a single official word. For an artist historically loyal to her active brand partnerships, the choice of footwear carried its own meaning. The sighting, combined with the quietly confirmed contract conclusion, effectively announced her sneaker-free agency before any formal statement was made. Sources close to the situation describe the split as entirely amicable, the straightforward result of a contract completing its term rather than a fractured creative relationship. The same reports indicate that A$AP Rocky’s creative partnership with PUMA is similarly winding down, with his final collaborative designs expected at retail this spring, signaling a broader reset in PUMA’s celebrity endorsement strategy rather than an isolated departure.
Rihanna’s FENTY x PUMA Partnership: Two Eras and What They Built
The original FENTY x PUMA era, which began in 2014 when Rihanna joined as creative director for womenswear, is remembered as a genuinely transformative cultural moment. The Creeper, a platform sneaker that combined athletic construction with a chunky sole profile previously uncommon at this commercial scale, became one of the most influential silhouettes of the mid-2010s and pushed PUMA to record sales figures during a period when the brand had been largely outpaced by Nike and Adidas in cultural conversation. The luxury streetwear boom that followed owed a direct debt to what the 1.0 FENTY era established about what women’s sneaker design could look like.
The 2.0 era, which launched alongside the renewed contract in March 2023, arrived in a fundamentally different market. The cultural landscape that made the original Creeper feel genuinely surprising had shifted, and the sneaker market was more crowded with prestige collaborations than it had been a decade earlier. Solid releases, the soccer-inspired Avanti, the Creeper Phatty, and the Cat Cleat sandal, found their audiences but did not replicate the era-defining hype of the first chapter. That gap between the two eras is not a failure of execution. It is a reflection of how rare lightning-in-a-bottle cultural moments actually are, and how difficult they are to recreate deliberately.
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What Comes Next for Rihanna
OVER AGAIN: The partnership between Rihanna and Puma has reportedly ended, per @LoisSakany ✍️
Rihanna has recently been spotted wearing Nike. A$AP Rocky’s partnership with the brand is also believed to be winding down. pic.twitter.com/m9MIr8MDeI
— Sole Retriever (@SoleRetriever) May 20, 2026
Rihanna’s commercial position in 2026 is considerably different from where it was in 2014 when she first signed with PUMA. Fenty Beauty and Savage X Fenty operate under the LVMH umbrella as genuine business entities with their own cultural weight. She is not a pop star supplementing her income with a brand deal; she is a billionaire mogul for whom a sneaker partnership is a creative choice rather than a commercial necessity. That freedom means she can take her time, choose selectively, and wait for a partnership that matches her current stature rather than accepting the first available offer.
The Jacquemus x Nike Moon Shoes sighting is the most informative detail currently available. Jacquemus has established itself as one of the most culturally literate brands operating in the intersection of high fashion and streetwear. Nike’s collaborative relationship with Jacquemus has produced some of the most discussed footwear of the past two years. Whether Rihanna’s public appearance in that specific shoe was a deliberate signal or a genuine moment of personal preference, it tells the market something about the aesthetic register she is currently occupying. The next chapter of FENTY footwear, whenever it arrives, will almost certainly reflect that.
Featured image: Puma/Dennis Leupold
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