Alessia Cara is FASHION’s Summer 2025 Cover Star

A rogue speck of glitter has travelled into Alessia Cara’s eye, and it’s causing an unavoidable disturbance. “Oh my God, sorry,” she says sweetly, pausing our conversation to remove the debris lingering in her lash line. She approaches the dressing-room mirror to get a better look, apologizing (seven times in two minutes) for the interruption—as if her burning cornea were a saboteur of everyone’s schedule. Cara seems acutely aware of the ticking clock, and, as I soon learn, nothing troubles her more.

“The passage of time is top of mind in my life,” she explains after sitting back down across from me, eyes now thankfully clear. “It’s my Mount Everest that I climb on a daily basis. If I am left long enough by myself, that’s where my head goes. I’m like, ‘Everything ends, and when is this going to end?’ You know, that impending-doom feeling.”

It’s not hard to see why impermanence has been plaguing the pop star of late. A few months away from turning 29, she’s on the brink of her Saturn Return: the seminal astrological period in your late 20s wherein chapters close, priorities realign and uncomfortable life changes occur. “I can sense a shift happening,” the self-proclaimed astrology enthusiast says. To be fair, that feeling could be attributed to the release of her new album, Love & Hyperbole, a 14-track tale of transformation. Or perhaps it’s because, when we speak, she’s about to embark on a world tour for the first time in six years. Obvious explanations aside, in this moment, Cara is placing bets. “I’m very much anticipating my world to be rocked,” she tells me. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time.

When we meet in early April, it’s been almost 10 years since the release of “Here,” the anti-social anthem that catapulted Cara into mainstream-music fame. Released in 2015 on SoundCloud, the song was an immediate underdog hit. Unlike the reigning hedonistic hype-up tracks of that year—“Cool for the Summer,” “Shut Up and Dance,” “Can’t Feel My Face”—Cara’s introverted ballad tapped into an admittedly uncool yet universal adolescent experience: feeling bad about yourself at a social gathering. (“I ask myself, ‘What am I doing here?’” an 18-year-old Cara belts.) It became a pillar of 2010s pop culture (along with the self-love single “Scars to Your Beautiful”), crystallizing the singer as a soft-spoken fly-on-the-wall idol.

A decade later, Cara, who brims with old-soul sincerity, finds it all a bit odd. “Most people remember me as a teenager, which is strange, because I’ve obviously evolved,” she reflects. “But I do feel, in a sense, like I’m immortalized as this version of myself that’s so new and wobbly.”

Cara has a smooth, velvety voice that suits her ability to belt bold declarations and deliver tender conversational confessions. As we chat, she is softly self-effacing and endearingly apologetic, peppering her answers with qualifiers like “This is gonna sound cheesy” or “I hope that makes sense.” Despite this, her stream-of-consciousness musings are crystal clear. At the end of our chat, she almost apologizes for being so open. “I hope it was OK,” she says. “Sometimes I just talk way too much.” “We’re all here for you,” I want to respond, but I figure it’s best not to remind her.

Cara has always felt weird about being the centre of attention. Raised in Brampton, Ontario, she wasn’t born into a Hollywood dynasty like many of her industry peers. She comes from a blue-collar Italian-immigrant household—her mom a hairdresser, her dad a welder—in which fame was a faraway concept. Growing up in a loud, warm, “can’t-get-a-word-in” environment, she was lovingly teased for being the quiet outlier in a sea of unreserved relatives, and family was the cornerstone of her home life. “That’s been grounding in an industry that’s quite the opposite,” she says.

Her old YouTube singing clips, which date back 14 years, paint a picture of an aspiring star with a shy personality, performing for an audience she couldn’t see. One such cover (a rendition of “Sweater Weather” by The Neighbourhood) caught the attention of an entertainment executive’s daughter. When that executive, Tony Perez, offered to fly Cara to New York City to meet in 2013, it resulted in her signing a record deal. She began working on her first album, Know-It-All, while still in high school and kept the project a secret from her peers. (“I was a little embarrassed about the whole thing.”) Little did she know that it would land her on the Billboard Hot 100 and shoot her into a staggering—sometimes scary—stratosphere of stardom. When Cara earned Best New Artist at the 2018 Grammys, the already-overwhelming moment was shrouded in internet meanness. Online critics argued she didn’t actually qualify because she wasn’t “new” enough. (She was 21 years old.) “I felt this need to apologize and not celebrate,” she says. It’s her one regret.

“There’s something strange that happens when you experience that level of public perception that young, because you’re still forming your own opinion of yourself,” she reflects, comparing her sudden celebrity status to being a “zoo animal.” It became hard to make friends, maintain relationships and even look people in the eye. “I always had my head down,” she shares. “I was very uncomfortable being in any sort of public space.” In many ways, her latest release presents a poetic rebuttal to this suffocating side effect of fame.

At its core, Love & Hyperbole is a lengthy exercise in letting go. It tracks Cara’s journey from feeling reclusive and resentful to hopeful and free. She nurtures her younger self and faces her fixation on time, an anxiety that started during the COVID pandemic when her close friend was diagnosed with a terminal illness. “That’s when everything switched for me,” she recalls. As months went on, she started getting panic attacks, which froze her in a spiral of seclusion. “I realized ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t have friends; I’m afraid to put myself out there romantically; I feel stuck as a writer because I didn’t allow for new experiences,’” she says. In 2021, she put these existential worries into the album’s opening song, aptly titled “Go Outside!” And then she went and did just that.

“That’s actually what life is about: surrounding yourself with loved ones, laughing, going outside, sipping coffee… finding moments in between the hard work to just enjoy.”
Alessia Cara has synesthesia, a sen­sory crossover that allows her to see colours in music. For Love & Hyperbole, the palette was obvious: black, grey, white and red, which reflect her emotional evolution. She intends to take this aesthetic storytelling on tour, where she styles herself, opts for practical footwear and performs in flowy silhouettes instead of bedazzled bodysuits. When it comes to fashion, Cara is famously no-frills—an unconventional trait for a pop star of her calibre.

Even at the height of early fame, she would show up to red carpets in sneakers, distressed jeans and bomber jackets. (To accept her Grammy, she wore Converse.) It started simply enough: She valued comfort. But she soon realized she had a point to prove. “People hated it so much that I was like, ‘Oh, this is necessary now,’” she explains. With this defiantly dressed-down approach, Cara became Everygirl’s pop star—her lived-in looks mapping her growth as a regular person instead of a packaged product. Still, she experiments with style in her own way. “It will be nice to play with my romantic side,” she teases about her upcoming onstage outfits.

Oh, yeah—Alessia Cara is also now in love.

“In the past, I’ve made myself smaller in relationships,” she explains. “But a true, healthy love is supposed to expand you.” Cara keeps that part of her life private, an admirably rare boundary for someone with over four million Instagram followers. These days, however, maintaining normalcy is much more manageable.

Things have calmed down publicity-wise, and Cara likes it that way. “People don’t care as much, which is nice,” she says lightly. She can walk around and feel anonymous, be a regular at a coffee shop. She can hold—and actually enjoy—conversations. At 28, Cara relishes the small stuff. “Maybe it’s because I’ve reached certain levels early on, but I’ve come to realize that simplicity is beautiful,” she observes. “That’s actually what life is about: surrounding yourself with loved ones, laughing, going outside, sipping coffee… finding moments in between the hard work to just enjoy.”

Later that afternoon, on-set for her FASHION cover shoot, she has switched into work mode. With a crew looking on, she poses inside a white bouncy castle wearing a pair of purple high-heeled boots. “Sorry, my eyes are watering!” she announces to the room. (This optical interference is caused by the wind machine blowing in her face.) Then, I see her doing something she mentioned earlier—a trick to cope with the overstimulating effect of the spotlight. “It sounds cheesy, but breathing helps,” she had told me. “Closing my eyes for a second, taking a moment.” I watch her, in between wobbles, as she inhales and releases, making space for stillness. Life is full of interruptions, abrupt endings and imperfect conclusions. But as Cara knows, it helps to breathe, blink and find beauty in the balancing act.