On 10 April 2026, Sabrina Carpenter crowned a phenomenal two-year run of global pop excellence with a headline slot at Coachella, the Californian music festival where pop royalty is anointed. The date is significant, falling one day short of the second anniversary of the release of ‘Espresso’, a song which changed the course of Sabrina’s life; the kind of pop hit which lands once every half-generation, reminding audiences of the inebriating togetherness of verse-chorus-verse-chorus-middle-eight-chorus-end. The start of Sabrina Carpenter’s Imperial Phase was delightful. Resistance to this kind of leviathan hit music is futile. Once dropped into the ether, it simply exists as naturally as air, filling the components of the atmosphere with its effortless prettiness.

Sabrina Carpenter was quick to make good on her crystalline pop moment, following it up sharply with a string of confessional classics that rounded out her delightful pop persona. She stuffed two career-defining albums – first Short n’ Sweet, then last year’s Man’s Best Friend – with the kind of musical references and witty lyrical clauses that edged her away from her old Disney kid peers and called to mind genuine giants like Dolly Parton, Debbie Harry and even, at her driest and most eye-rolling, Kirsty MacColl. On set for her Perfect shoot, somebody commented that Sabrina pre- and post-‘Espresso’ called to mind the liberation of Kylie Minogue pre- and post-Michael Hutchence, which made perfect arithmetic pop sense.

On her long-players, during her shows, in her superbly realised pop videos and all over socials, the diminutive blonde bombshell figure of Sabrina Carpenter proved to have the cultural muscle to reach right to the back of stadia. Like her predecessors, Ms Carpenter found a particular sweet spot in taking a strip or two off her romantic suitors. Her specialty in song is to cut men right down to size. With this reputable skill honed, her already assured queer following set like cement. So Sabrina is camp, yes, but only in the sense in which Susan Sontag once expounded the word: as the artificial flavorings of something deeply, unequivocally, often movingly real. 

There is something about Sabrina that means she could have been a star in any era. Yet here we are, in an age where one of its defining figureheads is a candid, pleasing pop singer who falls under the quaint banner of all-round entertainment. Relax, then, as your guide backstage to the Sabrina show comes in the hallowed figure of the irrepressibly gifted, uniquely culturally savvy fashion mogul, Marc Jacobs. Sit back as Marc lends Sabrina his ear, his wisdom and his confidences. As she preps for the biggest moment of her professional life, they make for a beautifully ruminative coupling…