Sabrina is the cover star for Vogue Magazine’s March 2025 issue! Along with a photoshoot, Sabrina portrayed many characters in a news-related skit dubbed “The Short Report With Sabrina Carpenter”. Photos from the photoshoot, screen captures from the video and the magazine cover have been added to the gallery. Both articles and the video can be read and watched below.

Cover

Photoshoot

Screen Captures

Behind the Scenes

How the World Fell for Sabrina Carpenter

To fully appreciate the global phenomenon that is Sabrina Carpenter, you have to go to one of her shows. You have to hear with your own ears a sold-out arena chanting the very sexual and ungrammatical lyrics of her nu-disco earworm Espresso—Say you can’t sleep, baby I know / that’s that me espresso—which has 1.9 billion streams on Spotify and is still omnipresent nearly a year after it came out. You have to see her fans, known as Carpenters, squeal when she performs her indie-pop anthem Juno”, especially when she gets to this line: Wanna try out my fuzzy pink handcuffs?

You need to behold the dress code at scale. Need to witness thousands of Carpenters decked out in Brinacore”, which tends to involve slinky dresses and miniskirts and short shorts and fishnet stockings and those stacked platform boots called Pleasers. There’s a lot of baby blue, a lot of pale pink. Sequins and hearts are encouraged. So are kiss marks. Extra points if they’ve got one of Carpenter’s temporary kiss-mark tattoos, available at the merch booth, stuck to a shoulder or thigh. The look is both exuberantly girly and unapologetically provocative—a cousin of the capital-R romantic trend known as coquettecore, but a lot cheekier.

Carpenter’s fan base wasn’t built in a day. The former Disney star, now 25, put out five albums between 2015 and 2022. But her sixth, Short n’ Sweet, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart in September and quickly went platinum, has struck a different cultural chord. It’s a fluent romp through genres—disco, country, R&B, folk—fused with a droll writing style that seems perfectly calibrated for this moment. With the new album, Carpenter, formerly something of a teen-pop confection, also took an aesthetic turn. In her music videos and on tour, she’s been embodying ultrafeminine archetypes, all of them a little retro yet glossed in high sheen.

I saw Carpenter perform in November, in San Diego, at the Pechanga Arena, where gaggles of Carpenters were taking selfies outside and art-directing group shots. I met Carpenter’s rep near a fleet of tour buses covered in kisses, and he took me down to her dressing room to say hello before the show.

Pechanga is an aging venue, a big concrete oval built in 1966 that’s known to generations of locals by its former name, the Sports Arena. Its heyday was the ’70s, and it stands as a monument to the arena rock of that era—Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, Queen, Kiss. The backstage area, open and bare-bones, felt a little like a YMCA locker room. But Carpenter’s dressing room was intimate and warm, with couches, a kitchenette stocked with snacks, and a candle burning on the coffee table. She greeted us at the door and then returned to a vanity mirror in the corner to finish doing her own makeup.

Carpenter is five feet tall—Short n’ Sweet is partly a reference to her height—and even more doll-like in person than she is onscreen. Her hair had been transformed into a surge of blonde curls. (Curls so full and bouncy, they’ve sparked speculation that she wears a wig onstage.) Her cheeks were glowing with the inimitable rosy flush that launched a thousand makeup tutorials. From the neck down, though, Carpenter was still in civilian mode. She had on a Phillies T-shirt and sweatpants.

With Carpenter were three others: Sarah, her sister and creative partner; Sarah’s boyfriend, George; and her close friend Paloma. They were holding and petting Carpenter’s Cavapoo, Louie, and another little dog, Goodwin, a Maltese–Lhasa apso–Chihuahua–Yorkie she got as a birthday gift when she turned 13. Conversation turned to the fans outside. Carpenter said she’d just realized that her shows were now occasions to dress up, especially in cities that aren’t New York or Los Angeles. Often, when she spots her fans before a concert, she is wearing the equivalent of gym clothes. I dress like a little boy for most of the day, if I’m trying to hide”, she said. They don’t even know it’s me and I’ll be standing right behind them”.

The quality of being several things at once pervades Carpenter’s music, and in her presence it seemed to multiply. The contrast between her outfit and her glammed-up countenance was heightened by her speaking voice, which is significantly lower than her singing voice. But the person speaking was very much the one I’d come to know through her songs: candid and blunt. He’s obsessed with humping people’s legs today”, she warned about Louie. (She wasn’t wrong. Louie humped my leg later.) She was also a quick wit. When the group noted that Louie and Goodwin had backstage passes hanging from their collars, she said, Stray dogs try to break in here all the time”.

After a while Carpenter’s parents, David and Elizabeth, came in. They live in Palmdale but had driven in the night before from Arizona, in their RV, which was now parked at a resort nearby. (David works for an X-ray servicing company; Elizabeth is a chiropractor, and she had given Carpenter an adjustment earlier that day.) As Carpenter went into an adjacent room to change, they relayed that their drive had gone less than smoothly. A lot of issues”, David said. Yeah, we hit a tree”, Elizabeth said. It’s all good. The tree is fine”.

Carpenter’s Grammy nominations had been announced two days earlier. (She would take home two on the night itself—best pop solo performance and best pop vocal album—and deliver a showgirl-inspired medley of her hits.) In the dressing room at Pechanga, I asked Elizabeth where they were when they learned about the nominations. Before she could answer, Carpenter reemerged, now wearing a glittering crimson red corseted bodysuit, a matching garter belt, white fishnet stockings, and white satin Mary Jane dance heels. It was bombshell burlesque with a slight musical-theater bent, as though a glamorous bump-and-grind performer had swung by Capezio for some character shoes. Everyone in the room let out some sort of loud noise. (Louie barked his head off.) This is tonight’s color”, Carpenter said of the red, in a faux-melodramatic diva tone.

When the commotion died down, Elizabeth picked up where she’d left off. They were at an RV lot in Bullhead City, Arizona. We were packing up and I really lost track of time, so I really wasn’t focused”, she said. That’s when Carpenter called from a tour bus on the outskirts of San Francisco. She’s like, Mommy— Elizabeth’s voice cracked and trailed off.

In a voice so direct and assertive I couldn’t imagine it ever uttering the word mommy, Carpenter chimed in from the corner. And then immediately the first thing she texted me after 20 minutes is a picture of her tire that had fallen off her RV. And it just says: Fuck”. Big laughs all around the room. Not even like: Still thinking about that. So proud of you, baby girl”.

Carpenter added that, later that day, she and Sarah went out for a celebratory meal at her favorite breakfast place in San Francisco. We get there two minutes after they closed. And they were like, ‘We won’t let you order anything off the menu, but we will bring the scraps from the kitchen.’ Did she explain the circumstances? The six Grammy nominations? Absolutely, and they did not care”, Carpenter said, visibly amused. It was so funny because it was just like: You know what? This is so humbling. Life just really does go on. I’m so excited. But wow, no one gives a fuck”.

The Short n’ Sweet Show is a pop musical in three acts. Think Cher’s 1970s variety show crossed with Playboy After Dark, with twists. It begins with video of Carpenter in a bubble bath. Then the real Carpenter runs out onstage, wearing only a bath towel—or so it seems, until she peels the towel open to reveal the sparkly corset underneath. In San Diego this incited Beatlemania-volume screaming.

The set is designed to look like a penthouse apartment in Manhattan, and as Carpenter jumps from song to song and genre to genre, she moves from room to room. She performs her country ballad Slim Pickins in front of a mid-century fireplace, wearing a sheer babydoll nightie. Her silhouette calls to mind Brigitte Bardot but her lyrics do not: Jesus, what’s a girl to do? / This boy doesn’t even know the difference between there, their, and they are / Yet he’s naked in my room”. Bed Chem”, her R&B ode to desire, unfolds in a bedroom bathed in red light, with the audience belting out this spoken-word part: Where art thou? Why not upon-eth me? / See it in my mind, let’s fulfill the prophecy”. When she sings the folkie song Coincidence—What a surprise, your phone just died / Your car drove itself from LA to her thighs—she’s in an upholstered conversation pit, wearing a Marilyn-esque lace catsuit.

On tour, Juno has taken on a life of its own. The title refers to the 2007 teen-pregnancy movie of the same name, and so does this line in the chorus: I might let you make me Juno”. Carpenter performs it in a shimmering ABBA-inspired halter top and miniskirt, and when she gets to the bridge—Adore me, hold me and explore me / I’m so fuckin’ horny—the word HORNY flashes behind her in girly pink lights. Before the song begins, she brandishes a pair of fuzzy pink handcuffs and arrests someone in the audience. Near the end, she makes her way to a heart-shaped secondary stage on the arena floor, speaks the lyric Have you ever tried this one? and then debuts a new position. (Yes, that kind.)

These Juno moments, along with some explicit choreography in the Bed Chem sequence, have turned Carpenter’s tour into a traveling meme factory. Videos of the various positions—missionary in New York City, cowgirl in Nashville—immediately go viral online. (If you google every Juno position and watch the video montage that comes up, what you really get a sense of is just how hard this girl is working.) On TikTok her fans have been contributing increasingly acrobatic and outlandish positions of their own. Over audio of Carpenter’s lead-in—Have you ever tried this one?—someone might be twirling upside down on an office chair, hanging seductively off a piece of gym equipment, or doing standing splits underwater.

A core faction of Carpenter’s audience has followed her every move from the beginning. This is apparent during a section of the show when Carpenter banters back and forth with the audience, something she started doing on previous tours. The woman sitting to my left, Mariah Santos, 27, seemed to know every lyric of all of Carpenter’s songs, the old ones and the new ones. She was in town from Tacoma, Washington, to inspect Navy ships—the best way I can describe what I do for a living is Rosie the Riveter”, she told me—and had been a fan of Carpenter’s since she starred on the Disney Channel show Girl Meets World. Santos said that Carpenter has never put on a mask: She’s a normie at heart”.

When I saw Carpenter again, the first week of December, she had just wrapped the American leg of the tour. (Her European dates begin in early March.) We met at the Cara Hotel in Los Feliz. She arrived at noon, wearing a red sleeveless turtleneck sweater, black capri pants, and black kitten heels. Her blonde hair—unambiguously her own—was pulled back in a velvet claw clip, and her cheeks gleamed with a dialed-down, daytime version of that signature blush. We sat at an outdoor table in a courtyard encircled by tall hedges.

Carpenter’s last three American shows, all in Los Angeles, had spurred a good deal of discussion online, much of it driven by concertgoers who hadn’t fully grasped what show they were going to see. I’m a fan of it”, she told me. Growing up, those were the kinds of shows I would want to go to. Ones where I thought I knew what I was getting, but I got something completely different”.

Still, there was something illustrative about all the confusion and the way Carpenter’s act became a kind of Rorschach test. Some felt that her show was inappropriate for children. Others wondered how anyone could be surprised at the racy segments considering the content of her songs. Still others thought it strange that anyone found Carpenter risqué, given her mid-century look.

These dissonant elements have been in the DNA of Short n’ Sweet from the start. In the music video for Espresso”, she’s a vintage pinup come to life, bopping around a color-saturated beach landscape. It’s part Barbie, part Beach Blanket Bingo. But also not, because soon her lower half is getting rubbed down with suntan oil by one of the cabana boys. There’s a satirical tone to it all, to the way she holds a teacup and saucer on the beach while singing, I know I Mountain Dew it for ya”. When she mouths one of her most memed lines—I’m working late, ’cause I’m a singerrr—she does so into an ice cream cone, with a faux-self-serious eye roll. It’s tongue-in-cheek bubblegum, delivered so playfully that you could easily miss the innuendo.

Carpenter told me that her Short n’ Sweet persona is not a created character, but rather a more theatrical version of herself. Short n’ Sweet is absolutely me”, she said. There’s no, like, alter ego. But it’s definitely a more emphasized version of me. It’s interesting because I’m able to dress in this way where you would kind of expect to hear like a voice from the ’60s. But then, when I’m speaking to the audience, I’m just myself”.

In some ways the Short n’ Sweet sensibility evolved out of her previous album, Emails I Can’t Send. That was a heartbreak album, and she had wanted it to feel stripped-down and timeless. She took inspiration from old photos of Kate Moss: That’s why, on the cover of Emails, I’m just in this black slip dress. There’s nothing too complicated about it. My hair’s very natural”. Then, on the Emails tour, something began to shift. I started wearing outfits that felt more like myself. And then it sort of bled into, like, I was writing these songs that felt more and more like my personality”.

By the time she was recording Short n’ Sweet, Carpenter was in a different mood altogether—and gravitating toward more classic, carnal, sex-bomb silhouettes. I remember feeling inspired by images of women that felt very strong and hyperfeminine. And then being like: If only she said what she was actually thinking”.

Carpenter would prefer that you not look them up, but the most complete documentation of her musical range can be found in old videos on YouTube. She started posting them when she was nine, as her application to a Miley Cyrus–run singing contest.

Young Carpenter covers the usual suspects—Taylor Swift, Adele, Christina Aguilera, Pink—but also an array of older artists. In one video she does a convincing rendition of Sinéad O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U”. In another, she hits all the notes of At Last by Etta James. There’s an interpretation of Sweet Child O’ Mine”, complete with Axl Rose headband. And there’s a whole Michael Jackson medley, in which she covers Black or White and Ease on Down the Road”, skipping along with a brace on her wrist. When she introduces her version of Come Together”, Carpenter’s wearing a T-shirt with peace signs all over it and a glam rock scarf. I really, really love this song, even though I wasn’t around when the Beatles were big”, she says.

This was in and around Quakertown, Pennsylvania, where Carpenter grew up the youngest of four girls. (The oldest, Cayla, a half sister from her dad’s previous relationship, is a hairstylist. Her other sister, Shannon, is a dancer.) Asked to describe her hometown, she answered with one word: Desolate”. She then added that it holds a record for the most fast-food restaurants in a square mile. That’s basically what we’re known for. So I had a really big imagination, which was super necessary for me, I guess”.

Carpenter was a precocious child—a sarcastic, snarky kid from day one”, she says—with serious singing chops. When her family would go out to eat at a local Irish pub called the Limeport Inn, a waitress named Patty would bring her around the tables and have her sing Happy Birthday to customers, sometimes for money. (Her mom would make Carpenter give the money back.) That was a short-lived dream, but also kind of my first real audience”. Starting in the fourth grade, Carpenter was homeschooled. I don’t know why, but I decided I wanted to focus on my career”, she said. I was like, I want to audition for things”. While her sisters were at school, she spent a lot of time alone. During that period, she told me, I got to know my weird little head”.

In the Miley contest, Carpenter made it to the final three. After that contest ended—did not win, got to meet Miley, though, big perk—I kept doing it because I just loved it so much. I also felt like I was finding my voice through covering other people’s songs”. Her dad had turned a small closet into a recording space. It was like a Harry Potter closet under the staircase”, she said. He painted it purple and put padding on the walls for me and my microphone in there. And I just felt super legit”.

Carpenter refers to her tween years as her fedora era”, because she often wore that style of hat. I was, like, a child, but I also was, like, a studious young man”, she told me. I got very artsy with my videos. Sometimes I would take it outside”. And because the whole operation was improvised, she learned to keep it tight. We didn’t know how to edit, you know what I mean? My dad didn’t, like, know what he was doing. It was like: Record. Take. Stop recording. You’re done”. Eventually she started working with a vocal coach. I was constantly taking lessons and wanting to improve ’cause I was like: I only have one take and it’s live!

Carpenter signed a five-record deal with Disney’s Hollywood Records when she was 12. By then she was also getting acting jobs. She was cast in an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in 2010 and, three years later, in an episode of Orange Is the New Black. When she was 13, the Girl Meets World pilot got picked up, and she and Elizabeth moved to LA. In some ways it’s a fluke that Carpenter rose to fame as an actor first, but Girl Meets World was a fruitful playground. Carpenter was given a lot of rein to make her character, Maya Hart, her own. Very witty, very quick”, she said. Kind of emotional and all over the place, which feels like me in a lot of ways”.

The show ran for three years, during which time Carpenter put out Eyes Wide Open and Evolution. She released Singular: Act I and Singular: Act II while continuing to act on the side. (She had roles in the movies The Hate U Give and Tall Girl.) These early albums are a little unripe in places, but there are signs of the writer Carpenter would become. On Singular: Act I there’s a song called Sue Me”, which she wrote when she was 16 or 17, because she was getting sued by her former music managers. The song doesn’t get into her legal ordeal, but she did take inspiration from it. I’m so happy that it exists because I think that when a lot of people try to figure out where maybe my personality and my music and the bluntness and the honesty come from, I do think it started in that chapter of my life”.

In the end Carpenter made four albums with Hollywood Records, not five. (I definitely didn’t fulfill my contract, thank God”.) She signed with Island Records in January 2021, and released her first single with the label before the new deal was even announced. Perhaps you are familiar with the circumstances: That’s the month that Olivia Rodrigo released her hit Driver’s License”, in which she sings to an unnamed guy believed to be their fellow Disney star Joshua Bassett, You’re probably with that blonde girl”, and, She’s everything I’m insecure about”. No one will confirm much of anything here, but Carpenter’s rushed-​out single Skin”, released after Rodrigo’s, had lines like Maybe we could’ve been friends”, and Maybe blonde was the only rhyme”. I wrote it not envisioning it coming out”, Carpenter said. It was a bit of a whirlwind”.

Emails I Can’t Send, released in 2022, was Carpenter’s first album for Island and, as she often describes it, my first big-girl album”. In part because she had more creative control than ever before: That was my first time really, really getting to sit and steer the whole thing”. And also because the songs were deeply personal. My biggest heartbreak to date”, she said of the relationship that inspired Emails. My first real one. I hate to say that. It definitely makes all my exes before that feel like shit. I don’t mean to do that. I just think in a sense of really understanding the grieving-​someone-that’s-alive feeling. I never felt that until this one”.

The title track, the heaviest of the emails she couldn’t send, is addressed not to the ex in question but to her father. It’s a pull-no-punches missive about infidelity—You disgust me / Don’t make me cuss you out—and how, for a daughter, that sort of thing can become a gift that keeps on giving. Thanks to you, I can’t love right”, she sings. Why do we end up loving the people we love later in life? That song just really made a lot of things make sense for me”, she said. I was curious how she handled this with her dad, how he learned of the song’s existence. Sure as hell did not play it for him in person”, she said. I sent it to my mother first. There were definitely feelings involved. But you birthed me, so you kind of have to deal with the repercussions”.

Carpenter’s Emails tour lasted almost a year. When it finished, in August 2023, she then performed at 25 of Taylor Swift’s Eras shows, across Latin America, Asia, and Australia. Her stadiums make my shows look like clubs”, Carpenter said. Watching her keep their attention as if she’s playing in their living room, it was like—and I told her this—Your tour enabled me to do mine”.

On the Emails tour, Carpenter started doing a bit where, in each new city, she would deliver a new outro for Nonsense”, the one lighthearted song on Emails. The whole album’s a heartbreak album, and then ‘Nonsense’ is sort of like: Maybe I can fall in love again. It’s a very funny, unserious song”. The Nonsense outros got sillier and raunchier, and as they did, they went more viral, to the delight of Swifties on three continents. One night in Buenos Aires, she went out with: When I’m in the bedroom looking sexy. He’s having a ball, he call me ‘Messi.’ Argentina, will you be my bestie? In Rio de Janeiro, it was: Sipping on me like a caipirinha. How to turn me on, boy, I can teach ya. My new name is Ipanema ’Brina”. And in Sydney: Yeah, he’s pretty cute but will our kids be? This country’s so big, I hope it fit me. I Vegemite be in love with you, Sydney”.

From a distance, the Nonsense outros look like a bridge to Short n’ Sweet. I think they taught me a little bit more wordplay and a couple more innuendos”, Carpenter said. That might have bled into the next album. But it wasn’t because of that song. If anything I was kind of conscious of not doing ‘Nonsense’ 2.0. But I was happy that people felt they got an unfiltered version of me, and they weren’t running from it”.

Carpenter didn’t set out to write Short n’ Sweet. She didn’t have a blueprint in mind. She did know that she wanted to make a point about crossing genres. I had a lot of ideas musically, and for the one thing that pulls it all together to be my point of view. That was the one thing that I knew”.

The impulse was an irreverent one, in part. I’m such a stubborn little spit”, she said. I remembered growing up, and a lot of people telling me: You have to stay in your lane and pick your genre, otherwise you’re not a cohesive artist and you don’t know who you are. And that always bugged me”.

She wrote Espresso first, in France, on a 10-day break from the Emails tour. She had rented a house in the small town of Chailland, about three hours outside of Paris, and invited the songwriters Amy Allen, John Ryan, and Julian Bunetta to join her. It was the middle of summer, in 2023, and Chailland was deserted. When I tell you it was a ghost town—all there was was this house, an empty church, and then like five minutes up the road there was a creperie”. They worked at a leisurely pace. I would write for a bit, I would start something, and then I would go on a walk, and I would get an espresso from this creperie”.

Compared to everything else Carpenter had been working on, Espresso was an outlier. I was writing all these sad songs, and ‘Espresso’ was like the one breath of fresh air. In the midst of all of it, I was like, This is still such a huge part of me—this mentality and the sense of humor and the playfulness”.

One of the next songs Carpenter wrote with the group, late one night in Chailland, was Dumb & Poetic”. It’s a savage dressing-​down of a certain kind of New Age guy—You’re running so fast from the hearts that you’re breakin’ / Save all your breath for your floor meditation—delivered in the style of an earnest, singer-​songwritery ballad. Carpenter had the concept, the title, and the line I promise the mushrooms aren’t changing your life”, which she rhymed with You’re so empathetic, you’d make a great wife”. Played live, the song elicits a passionate response. Many of Carpenter’s lyrics acquire an extra layer of humor when screamed aloud by an arena full of fans, but a particular couplet from Dumb & Poetic might take the cake: Try to come off like you’re soft and well-spoken / Jack off to lyrics by Leonard Cohen”. The song manages to be vulnerable and hilarious and also sort of meta. Writing it pointed the way forward: That song is a reason why the album is the album”, Carpenter said.

Espresso and Dumb & Poetic served as poles—two massive goalposts”, as Allen put it—between which Carpenter could carve out a vast territory. In making room for a range of genres, she made room for more sides of her personality. Ryan had worked on Emails, and he told me that he was often struck by a kind of tonal gap between the heavier songs on that album and the person writing them. She’s so brilliantly sharp and quick and funny”, he said. Most of the sessions, we’re just laughing the whole time, even if we’re writing a sad song”. He would get into it with her sometimes. I was sort of like: When is this funny person gonna start coming through in the records?

Allen said that even Carpenter’s language is more uniquely her own, more specific to her. The way she talks and the way she is in person is exactly how she writes”, she said. I think that’s really what made her music cut through this year. Because she says everything in her songs exactly the way she would say it in conversation”.

Allen and Carpenter are close friends, and if you listen closely to Short n’ Sweet, it shows. There’s a shorthand to the writing, as though the lyrics were plucked from a private text thread. There are so many inside jokes”, Allen said. We were really writing just for who was in the room, not thinking about the reaction that the world would have to it. I think that’s what allowed it to be so personality-driven and so intimate”.

I remember very specifically when she walked in the room with the concept for ‘Lie to Girls,’ Allen went on, referring to the penultimate track on the album. This was at a writing session at Electric Lady in New York, with Jack Antonoff. I felt so taken aback at how emotional I felt at just that concept alone”, she said. I relate so wholeheartedly to the lyric ‘You don’t have to lie to girls. If they like you, they’ll just lie to themselves.’ Every woman I know can relate to that sentence. And it’s said so cleanly”.

With Allen and Antonoff, Carpenter wrote two other songs that same day, including Please Please Please”, the country-​inflected disco-pop song that has Carpenter pleading: Heartbreak is one thing. My ego’s another / I beg you, don’t embarrass me, motherfucker”. (It’s her second global No. 1 on Spotify and first No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100.)

The rest of the songs were written in California. The seed for Juno came out of a long night at the Chumash Casino in Santa Ynez. Again, Carpenter had rented a house in the area, with Allen and Ryan. At some point, they needed a break. We were like, We gotta get out of here and go play some blackjack and mess around”, Ryan said. When they got back later that night, Ryan made a loop and they started writing melodies. Sabrina said this lyric, ‘Make me Juno.’ Like, pregnant. We all sort of laughed, and that was it”. The next day, they were playing around again. Sabrina was like, What about that Juno line? They planted the seed in an entirely different set of chords. By five o’clock, the new song was finished.

Island Records wanted the first single to be Please Please Please”. Carpenter felt strongly that it should be Espresso”.

She knew she would be debuting the single at Coachella. There’s something about this song that, if I’d never heard it before, and I heard it live for the first time, I would understand it”, she said. I was definitely being swayed in another direction, but I knew deep down that it was this song. I was afraid of disappointing people for, like, five minutes. And then I was like: No”.

Carpenter’s roadside billboard in the desert set the tone for the forthcoming album and did not go unnoticed: She’s gonna make you come…to her Coachella set! She performed Espresso on the main stage, one day after the single and music video were released. The backdrop: Sabrina’s Motel”, an ersatz inn with a neon sign and a vintage convertible Mercedes crashed into the front.

When Carpenter approached the London-based design firm Stufish Entertainment Architects about building her Coachella set, she already had the concept worked out. She’d crashed her boyfriend’s car into a motel”, recalled Ric Lipson, the production designer. It really had a narrative arc”. Lipson, whose firm designed Beyonce’s Homecoming pyramid and the sets for Madonna’s Celebration Tour, told me that Carpenter’s Coachella vision broke the mold in my opinion of what a regular pop show is and what a regular festival performance is”.

Carpenter had started wearing corsets during the Emails tour. Now she was adding more fantasy lingerie to her stage wardrobe. She wore her first babydoll nightie, red and sheer, on Saturday Night Live in May, the second time she performed Espresso live. In the opening shot, she held a prop tabloid newspaper on which was printed this headline: SABRINA LOVES TO BE ON TOP!

At the end of the Espresso video, Carpenter was arrested on the beach. In the new video for Please Please Please”, she’d be in jail—in a crystal open-back minidress and cross necklace, the first of several mob-wife looks. Espresso plays in the background as she’s bailed out and another criminal is brought in, in handcuffs: Carpenter’s then boyfriend, the Irish actor Barry Keoghan, he of the Saltburn nude dance scene. (After this interview, it was widely reported that she and Keoghan broke up, but Carpenter declined to discuss the matter.)

Three music videos rolled out this way—as an interconnected storyline, some sort of epic. The video for Taste”, released in August with the album, is an absurdly gory homage to Death Becomes Her in which Carpenter plays a spurned ex. She attacks the other woman (Jenna Ortega) with a butcher knife only to end up impaled on a white picket fence. Toward the end, Carpenter and Ortega find themselves kissing, in a play on the upbeat-sounding song’s dark chorus: I heard you’re back together, and if that’s true / You’ll just have to taste me when he’s kissin’ you”.

Then there was her turn at the MTV VMAs, where Espresso won song of the year in September. Remember the silver beaded Bob Mackie dress Madonna wore to the Oscars in 1991? Carpenter wore it on the red carpet. While performing Taste onstage, she reenacted the Madonna-​Britney kiss of 2003, but instead of kissing today’s version of Spears, whoever that is, she made out with a grayish-blue alien.

Back in San Diego, from a distance in the arena, Carpenter’s red corset glittered and reflected light like a disco ball. This was achieved with a prodigious amount of Swarovski crystals, said Carpenter’s stylist, Jared Ellner—30,000 per corset. We had a dream of the sparkliest corset on the entire planet”. Ellner also told me that there’s another secret reason for all the babydoll cuts: They’re comfortable. She has been snatched and exposed and all kinds of things onstage, so to have a little tent is a dream”, he said.

Carpenter wanted the experience of watching the show to feel like flipping channels on a TV. The songs are meant to be different channels, as are the interludes and commercials between acts. The segue into the third act, and into Dumb & Poetic”, had Carpenter’s audience particularly rapt. It’s a clip from a 1966 interview that Leonard Cohen gave to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In it, Cohen tells the interviewer that the message of poetry comes through in the body, the eyes, and the voice. That, read correctly, the instructions from a shoe-polish can could have the same effect. What’s the point of writing poetry then? the interviewer asks. Cohen responds: If you want people to have shiny shoes, you want to write those kind of very good instructions, and if you want to polish other parts of yourself, you do it with poetry”.

Carpenter’s sister Sarah found the clip after doing a deep dive into all things Leonard Cohen. I thought it was so poignant, because he’s kind of snarky and snippy, and I feel like that’s the essence of ‘Dumb & Poetic’, Sarah said. And the Leonard Cohen estate just, like, let us have permission”. Asked what other deep dives she did ahead of the tour, she said: Honestly, so many Playboy magazines. We bought a shit ton. We already had a bunch. But we bought more”.

Perhaps the one major thing that wasn’t completely planned out ahead of time: all those Juno positions. Well, initially I thought I’d just rotate between a couple, but I have this relationship with my fans where I know they want more from me”, Carpenter said. I don’t want to let them down. So sometimes I go: Oh, you know what? Fuck it. It’s Thursday. Let me give them a new one. And then it turned into: I should look up the 500 positions on the internet. And I realized: I’m in platform boots. There’s one of me. There’s only so many I can do by myself, with a microphone in my hand, and in two and a half seconds. So, um, bless me for Europe. I don’t know what’s gonna happen. I just try to have fun in the moment. That’s where most of those ideas come from. It’s really just like: I’m in Chicago. What’s Chicago gonna love?

Carpenter has a hobby that few people know about. She draws sketches—of people, animals, landscapes, whatever she’s feeling. It’s her way of keeping a journal. My grandma, who sadly passed away last year, was an incredible artist”, she told me when we spoke by phone in January. I think she threw that gene to me, because I started drawing at a really young age. I do it a lot when I’m not writing, and when I’m lucky enough to be a little bit bored”.

Carpenter was in London for another brief songwriting retreat. Her plan was to return to LA for the Grammys, release a deluxe version of Short n’ Sweet on Valentine’s Day with five additional tracks (including a Dolly Parton feature), then begin the European leg of her tour, in Dublin. I haven’t left and picked up a tour at this production level, so it’ll be interesting to see how I slip back into it”, she said. I start every year, just trying to go away and write. Because I feel like I have a lot to say at the end of a year. I’m just kind of tucked away right now. It’s half writing and half relaxation, if that’s something I can even accomplish”.

Source: Vogue

Is Sabrina Carpenter Running a Cult? The Pop Star Comes Clean in a Special Segment of The Short Report

What do Katrina Sharpenter, Serena Carpen-Terra, Christina Barbenter, and Regina Harpenter all have in common (besides their small stature and great hair)? They’re alter egos of one Sabrina Carpenter, bringing their various charms to bear on delivering The Short Report—a special dispatch from the Short n’ Sweet pop star (and Vogue’s March 2025 cover girl).

While Katrina Sharpenter can be trusted to anchor the news with a smile, an updo, and a pair of nerd-chic glasses, Serena Carpen-Terra is all red-carpet glamour—just don’t wear Crocs with ankle socks around her. Meanwhile, Christina Barbenter brings the Karen-from-Mean-Girls energy with her weather-forecasting and scanty attire; and Regina Harpenter is a sports reporter after my own heart. (“I’m standing here with a ball player who plays ball”. Huge Super Bowl mood!)

If you’ve ever longed to see Sabrina Carpenter interview herself, however, look no further than the pop star’s sitdown with Katrina Sharpenter. Although Carpenter brushes off the allegations that she’s “running a nationwide cult”, powered by the mesmeric appeal of pop hits like “Espresso” and “Please Please Please”, there’s clearly something otherworldly about the hold she has on her fans. It’s a good thing The Short Report has very real and objective journalists on the case!

Source: Vogue