The day before her death, Jenni performed in the Monterrey Arena, in a fabulous show with several wardrobe changes. Her most striking outfit was definitely a beautiful, bright fuchsia mermaid dress, with a yellow floral pattern running diagonally across Jenni’s figure. The dress hugged her curves down to her knees, then opened up like a fan down to the floor. Jenni wore a yellow shawl that matched the color of the flowers in her dress—she wore many of her gowns with matching shawls—and during her performance, she would occasionally hold out her arms, letting the shawl fall around her sides, and she would spin, showing off the magnificently designed gown.
Her fans knew that when they went to hear Jenni sing at one of her shows, every time she sang ranchera music she would wear one of these spectacular dresses, often in a mermaid style with a floral design and matching shawl. They were designed by Adam Terriquez, a Mexican living in Huntington Park, California. For over ten years, he personally designed the most gorgeous gowns that Jenni wore in concert.
Terriquez was not just Jenni’s designer, their relationship developed into a close friendship. They met in 2001 when Terriquez’ brother, who was Jenni’s makeup artist at the time, told him that Jenni wanted him to design a dress for her. “Jenni asked me to design a black dress for the Premios de la Radio that year, and we’ve been working together ever since…well, up until a few days ago, I was at her house taking measurements for other dresses,” Terriquez said after his friend’s death, still in disbelief.
When Terriquez began working with Jenni, he had already designed for big Mexican stars including Daniela Romo, Ana Barbara and Beatriz Adriana. He was known for his ball gowns with distinctly Mexican accents. In Jenni, he found a Los Angeles girl who liked to wear leather jackets and cowboy hats, but gradually she discovered glamour. Jenni would become his biggest client.
“For Jenni I’m designing a style more than fashion. Something that will last,” Terriquez said in an interview on the morning show Levántate, where he talked about the dress he had designed for her to wear to the Billboard Mexican Music Awards. And that’s how it was. Jenni’s fans couldn’t wait to see the dresses Terriquez designed for her. He estimated that he had designed around 500 dresses for her over the years.
What would come to define Jenni’s style were the mermaid gowns Terriquez designed, which hugged her curves without revealing the love handles Jenni often complained about, and the butterfly dresses with the long, wide, draping sleeves that simulated the warrior butterfly that Jenni embodied. Jenni’s favorite colors for her dresses, aside from red, were pink, turquoise, and coral.
“The first mermaid dress I designed was black with a floral pattern which she wore in concert at the Ford [Theatre] about ten years ago,” Terriquez told Andrea Carrion in an interview for Los Angeles Hoy published on December 13, 2012. “I had warned her not to bend down, because the dress was really tight. At one point she bent down to hug a child, and from the balcony I could see her zipper in back came undone. Without missing a beat, she said right into the microphone, ‘Where’s my freakin’ designer? Get out here and fix this dress!’ Later, while she’s still singing, I fixed the dress with some safety pins her mother had with her. When the show was over, she said cheerfully, ‘Don’t make my dresses with those cheap zippers anymore, buy the good ones.’ That’s how she was.”
Jenni was constantly battling her weight, and always wanted to wear clothes that would make her look slender while showing off her curves. It was no accident that her dresses were almost always low-cut, and formfitting in the rear, a part of her body that she would complain about jokingly, but she also showed it off.
Terriquez remembered that Jenni’s weight often went up and down. This is evident in her appearance over the years, and was a subject Jenni often talked about on her television show I Love Jenni. She was always going on a new diet, or trying to change her family’s eating habits.
But Jenni had also learned to love her body, and was resigned to the fact that she would always be full-figured, a woman with large breasts and a generous backside, like so many other Latinas. For years she had tried to fit her body into the clothes, but finally she decided to fit her clothes to her body.
“We can’t all be 36–24–36,” she said to the magazine Revista Mira in March 2005. “I like my big booty and having some meat on my bones. There’s something to grab on to!”
In that same interview, Jenni mentioned that she was planning to launch her own clothing line in 2006, created especially for women like her, for her fans: “It’s not easy to find sizes for full-figured gals like me, so I’ll try to make the collection tailored for those women, and it will be very casual.”
Jenni did not end up launching her clothing line in 2006, but she kept on working on it over the next few years, and—as with almost everything she said and thought—her goals and her statements on the project never changed. In April 2012, when I asked Jenni to speak at the Billboard Latin Music Conference, her clothing line was a subject of conversation again. She was especially excited about her new line of jeans, specifically designed for women who weren’t a size 0 and who did have big rear ends that never looked good in most of the popular jeans out there on the racks.
“I want to dress women like me—not the mannequins in the stores because those clothes don’t fit us,” she said at the Billboard Conference, her words echoing what she had said six years before. “We’re starting with the jeans. The jeans are for women with big hips and round butts. Because I’m so sick of going shopping and you try on jeans that are so low, if you sit down all your business is hanging out. You have to always readjust them. That’s so annoying. I want jeans like my grandmother used to say they should be: that go up to your waist, fit well everywhere, without a roll spilling out here and another over there. I need that, and I know many of my Latina friends need the same thing.”
Jenni launched her line of jeans in the spring of 2012, realizing a dream she had first had six years before. She promised that her customers would finally be able to look thinner, dissimulating certain love handles, or “lonjitas,” as she called them, without showing any lines.
The jeans came in sizes 4–18, and cost $60, much less than other designer jeans. Jenni was very proud of them. She had designed something she herself could wear; as with everything she did, this was inspired by and was for her fans. If circumstances had been different, she probably would have introduced new items to the line in the coming years, but that was not to be.
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Jenni always said she was an entrepreneur more than a singer, and that outlook was reflected in her wardrobe. The times that I interviewed her on camera for Billboard, she always looked feminine and sexy, but also imminently professional. She liked to wear her high heels, either with skirts or pants, always with a jacket. For the last Billboard Conference, for example, she wore a formfitting purple dress under a jean jacket. She liked wearing purple, it gave her the air of an executive. Off camera and away from the limelight, she was much more casual, and was most comfortable in jeans, baseball caps and little makeup.
“My own personal style is very mixed,” Jenni said on Batanga?.com on March 3, 2005. “I like to dress in lots of different ways, and when I’m on stage, some people don’t understand it; the people at my label don’t understand it; they want me to dress, you know, like a regional Mexican artist, in jeans and leather and a cowboy hat. That’s not me! That’s not the person my fans have identified with. They want to know that Jenni can put on some dressy boots with a miniskirt and be in style, like they are. So, when I’m just relaxing, and I’m alone and no one’s looking, I like to wear sweat suits and hip-hop style clothes—Adidas, Nike, sweat pants. I like that a lot, and I have a lot of sneakers. I like to dress like a businesswoman because that’s how I started. I still like to do that. And when I go out, I put on a miniskirt and heels and look all sexy for the boys.”
Jenni was very aware of the fact that she was a diva, and as such, she had to look absolutely magnificent on stage. For her last tour in Mexico, as always she asked Terriquez to design several dresses for the shows, and he fit her for them before she left. A week and a half before she flew to Mexico, Terriquez took fifteen dresses over to her house that she could bring to wear at her concerts.
“She had lost a lot of weight recently because she wanted to look good; she was crossing over into the English market and she wanted a different look,” the designer recalled in an interview published in Los Angeles Hoy on December 13. “The last time I fitted her for a dress I said, ‘You’ve lost a lot of weight.’ She said, ‘With everything that’s going on, I’m losing weight without even going on a diet.’ She was talking about the divorce. She didn’t seem worried, but on the inside she wasn’t doing so good.”
That night out onstage in Monterrey Jenni looked beautiful. So beautiful that the image of her wearing that fuchsia dress would be seared in the memories of everyone there that night, and everyone who saw photos of her posted on the Web.
Days later, when rescue workers in Mexico were finally able to locate the wreckage of the plane, one of the irrefutable signs that they had found her was that unmistakable fuchsia dress.
A day before it had represented Jenni Rivera’s vitality, as she wore the bright dress on the stage and spun around and around, with the yellow shawl fanning out from her shoulders. Now the dress was by itself, tossed on the rocks like a rag, its bright color the only sign of life in those freezing, desolate mountains.