Aaliyah rose to fame with a laid-back, edgy style. Scroll through the gallery to see some of her best looks from the s and early s. Hide Caption. Aaliyah performing at The Forum in Inglewood, California, in in a strappy bikini top with a vinyl coat and baggy pants. Aaliyah arriving at MTV's 20th anniversary event in Aaliyah performing in Tommy Hilfiger The singer and actress was 22 years old when the plane she was traveling on crashed soon after takeoff from the Bahamas on August 25, , killing her and eight others aboard.
The fascination with Aaliyah and her music have not abated in the two decades since the world tragically lost her. If anything, it has intensified as her catalog of music has been recently added to streaming services , something fans have long been clamoring for. Read More. In some ways, Aaliyah is more famous now than she was prior to her death. Their marriage license is dated August 31, Her family took charge of the situation, and on September 29, , the marriage was annulled.
Aaliyah told her family that she never wanted to see Kelly again, and they set about making sure she would never have to. The family understanding at the time seems to have been that the marriage, while plainly a bad idea, was just a case of two kids who cared for each other getting in over their heads.
Damon Dash, who was dating Aaliyah at the time of her death, says in Surviving R. Any sexual contact between Kelly and Aaliyah in would have been at the very least statutory rape. Often, it treated the story simply as a sudsy celebrity scandal, a fun pop culture reference to break out and dish over. Neither Kelly nor Aaliyah had anything to do with the album, but the scandal of their marriage seemed to be easy fodder for a buzzy one-liner, something to toss dismissively over your shoulder to establish your own coolness.
Marriage, however, is something else, and if Aaliyah and R. And R. He dressed her for it and produced it, and the world was happy to give him credit when the song was a hit. Then the song became inextricably linked to a scandal, and responsibility for it somehow transferred to Aaliyah.
She can go to jail. In the Vibe article that broke the story of the illicit marriage , Aaliyah is presented paradoxically: so young as to be a wicked temptress, while also more mature than Kelly himself. The article quotes Jamie Foster Brown, the editor of Sister2Sister magazine, who had been covering Kelly for years by the time this story became public.
Kelly, the big kid, continued to flourish professionally after the scandal. Kelly received his first Grammy nominations in His self-titled album went quadruple platinum. The scandal of their marriage was considered her fault. She was a little girl who tempted a grown man into jeopardy.
She was the one to blame. She was 16, 17 at the time of the second album. She recruited then-up-and-comers Missy Elliot and Timbaland to produce for her. She maintained the tomboy image Kelly had built for her but transformed it into something sleeker, less a mirror reflection of her former mentor. Aaliyah once again became a massive hit, even bigger than before. Her album One in a Million went double platinum. She stuck to the baggy low-slung pants Kelly had dressed her in, revealing her midriff, but she made the look more feminine, more rooted in her own aesthetic.
When she appeared in a Tommy Hilfiger ad in low Tommy jeans and a tiny bra top, she made the look iconic. With these two things alone she created one of the most lasting fashion looks of all time, combining femininity, masculinity and androgyny into one trend-setting game changer. Kelly, he would continue to haunt her career. The idea of Aaliyah and R. She loved him, and he loved her. She was always the figure granted agency, the one instigating scandalous acts, older than her years, while a hapless Kelly passively accepted her seduction.
Ciara, then 19, had just released a seductive duet with R. Kelly, and Kelly wrote the lyrics. The idea of Aaliyah as the party at fault in her relationship with R. Kelly had by then become baked into her image, where it had expanded until it was near-universally accepted.
Aaliyah became positioned in the public eye as a somehow inherently sexual teen — so whenever anyone treated her as a sex object, whether that person was R. A lot of teen idol pop stars are also sex symbols, and Aaliyah, with her tiny crop tops and her Veronica Lake swoop of hair, was no exception.
What was striking about Aaliyah, though, was the way in which the public understanding of her sexuality became intertwined with the public understanding of her as a child.
That juxtaposition was fundamental to the way people talked about Aaliyah — including Aaliyah herself. Aaliyah, laughing, overrules him. She describes having her mother photograph her for headshots as a child. Though there were multiple reports of the marriage being annulled by her parents in , the two both continued to deny the allegations. Kelly is currently on trial for multiple allegations of sexual assault involving underage girls.
Related: Ex-tour manager testifies against R. Kelly about Aaliyah. In , Aaliyah started moving into the film industry, with her music -- and her acting skills. On Aug. They originally planned to leave a day later, but filming for the video finished early, and the decision was made to leave, though the plane was smaller than the one they had arrived on. All of the equipment was loaded onto the plane. The plane crashed and caught fire shortly after takeoff. The plane suffered engine failure, and an investigation found that the aircraft had attempted to take off while overloaded with passengers and weight.
Investigators also found the pilot, Luis Morales, was not licensed to fly the plane, and toxicology results found he had traces of cocaine and alcohol in his system.
0コメント