Cardi B And Offset ​​​​​​​

A Hip-Hop Love Story.

- Vanessa Grigoriadis

 

One humid afternoon in Atlanta, Cardi B, the new princess of hip-hop, wakes up in an endless white mansion flanked by tall trees. This is her fiancé’s castle – he’s Offset from Migos – and there are enough six-figure cars parked outside to form a small-town parade. By the curved darkwood door, his friends smoke blunts in tracksuits as bright as British guardsmen’s jackets. Cardi, 25, and Offset, 26, are buying a new home shortly, and building a dream house too. But for now, this is the spot.

Waking up late, Cardi pads around the house barefoot in a yellow cotton dress pulled tight over her swollen, nearly seven-and-a-half-months-pregnant belly. She eats a salad, manages the feat of typing on her phone with three-inch rhinestone-encrusted fake nails, and relaxes into a leather chair. Half zoning out, half watching Avatar, about a different princess and her race to save a far-off-moon, she lets out a deep sigh. We are in the late stages of Cardi’s pregnancy and she’s finally wrapped the promotion for her first album, Invasion of Privacy, which topped the charts and set a record for the most first-week streams by a female artist on Apple Music. The exhausting pace of the past months – spent recording songs, perfecting a raft of lush videos and hiding her belly from the paparazzi – is receding now.

All she needs to do is enjoy the next seven weeks before she becomes a mom.