A month later, Rihanna debuted what still stands as one of her most spectacular looks: a sheer, little-left-to-the-imagination, crystal-encrusted dress to accept the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s Fashion Icon Award in 2014. She became the second musician, after Lady Gaga in 2011, to receive the honor (in previous years it went to Sarah Jessica Parker, Kate Moss, Nicole Kidman). At the CFDAs, Rihanna famously freed the nipple (“If I’m wearing a top, I don’t wear a bra; if I’m wearing a bra, I just wear a bra,” she once said) and she did it with supreme class; her look was both daring and original while subtly channeling nearly a century of fashion history. She’d topped it off with a flapper-inspired crystalline turban, a nod to the Jazz Age and fellow sheer frock wearer Josephine Baker who in 1926 challenged notions of race and gender and established herself as the most famous black female performer in the world. Rihanna’s dress also recalled barely embellished gowns worn by Marlene Dietrich and Marilyn Monroe. When a reporter dared query her choice on the red carpet, the singer swiftly shut her down. “Do my tits bother you? They’re covered in Swarovski crystals, girl!” There were no further questions.

At the 2015 Met Gala, her influence was apparent in the wave of sheer dresses that appeared on the red carpet, most notably worn by Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, and Kim Kardashian. What Rihanna herself wore to that year’s Gala has become one of, if not the, definitive look in her fashion trajectory. Her Guo Pei egg yolk-yellow robe with a nearly 10-foot long train spilled, waterfall-like, or omelet-like (memes proliferated online almost instantly), over the steps of the Met. Rihanna was of the few guests who hewed studiously to that year’s Costume Institute theme and wore a Chinese designer. She’d done her own research, and sourced the couture piece herself, on the internet—a voluminous, 55-pound, meticulously embroidered robe that had taken Pei two years to make by hand, working solo.

The Met, unlike other red carpets, invites a true sense of the outré—fashion wise, it’s a place where celebrities are given carte blanche to get fully weird. It’s also a place where practical concerns—like stage looks that must be durable enough to withstand maximum twerkage—go out the window. For Rihanna, it opened up another realm of expression—she performs the clothes she wears. “Witnessing Rihanna’s profound enjoyment of fashion is one of the great vicarious pleasures of this era,” Miranda July wrote in a fervent 2015 T magazine profile. “We all detonated the Met Ball in that giant yellow cape.”

It paved the way for her 2017 Met Gala look, in which her figure was surrounded by a fortress of Comme des Garçons rosettes, and for this year’s equally on-topic interpretation of the event’s theme. To co-chair the opening for the “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” exhibition at the Met, Rihanna arrived in a towering, silver papal mitier, cape, and minidress by John Galliano for Maison Margiela.

Perhaps most admirable is her ability to do highbrow and lowbrow fashion with equal aplomb, and to pull off a chameleon range of style transformations; Olivier Rousteing of Balmain, one of the first major designers to embrace Rihanna, has compared her to Prince, Michael Jackson, and David Bowie. And as exciting as the Guo Pei couture cape was, we also love the Rihanna who shed it later in the night for a low-cut stage look in which she danced over the tables, singing “Bitch Better Have My Money.”

We love the Rihanna who exudes total glamour, in the silver-embellished, body-hugging dress and the deep red gown she wore to dance through the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles—when she became the first black woman to front a campaign for Dior. But we also love the Rihanna who flaunts a predilection for going without pants whenever she pleases—just a jacket or a hoodie or a T-shirt, thank you very much—whether to the club, on the street, or on fashion front rows. We love the Rihanna who repeatedly Instagrams herself smoking weed; the Rihanna who waltzes out of a restaurant, or an event, or a club, taking her filled wine glass to go—a habit widely documented by fashion blogs and Time alike (and not to her detriment either; this year, Rihanna was named one of the magazine’s Most Influential People in the World).

“Rihanna speaks to her fans with every look,” Anna Wintour said when presenting the CFDA Icon Award. She regularly addresses her 88 million Twitter followers and her 62 million Instagram followers like best friends, dispensing fashion selfies like personal gifts. This is participatory pop stardom: the everyday outfits, the street style, the stage looks, and the Cinderella red carpet moments are theirs too. Within her wardrobe are infinite points of access, places for any of her fans to identify with and claim as their very own. In other words, she is both free enough with herself to fully inhabit a vast and daring range of looks, and generous enough to offer the world a multitude of versions of herself.

The Rihanna you admire most probably says more about who you are than who Rihanna is. Because she is all of it: the thigh-high lace-up boots, the gladiator sandals, the stiletto heels, the sneakers (she is the first female designer ever to win the Footwear News Shoe of the Year award, for her Puma creepers). She is the Gucci balaclava she wore just weeks ago on the desert stage at Coachella, which revealed only her mouth and the flash of her diamante-rimmed eyelashes, and probably made everyone else wishing they were as protected from the crowds as Rihanna. She is also the lingerie as outerwear, the spiked gold minidress, the black leather dresses, the tulle dresses, the sequins and the cut-offs, the hot pants, the curly hair, the straight hair, the red hair, the caramel hair, the hard-edged pompadour, the pixie cut, the waist-length hair, who cares... If there’s anything that unifies Rihanna’s wardrobe, it’s an evident and admirable lack of worry about what others may think of her combined with an alchemical talent for putting together and pulling off looks. As another writer commiserated with me recently, “Talking about Rih and fashion is like trying to talk about god.”