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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.

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