It’s what makes Sabrina sing

As the blonde bombshell releases album ‘Man’s Best Friend’, Ellie Muir unravels what’s gone into developing the Sabrina Carpenter brand and why her coquette persona is so alluring

- Ellie Muir

“Some people know me for, I guess, being explicitly horny, but it’s actually not as simple as that,” said a minidress-wearing Sabrina Carpenter during her Tiny Desk show last year.

That sentence perfectly sums up the polarising yet delicious “if you know, you know” dichotomy of the Sabrina Carpenter Brand. To the uninitiated, they may see a 26-year-old woman dressed in her signature diamante bustiers, suspenders and platform heels every shade of the pastel rainbow - complete with her blonde bombshell Brigitte Bardot-style hairdo and theatrical gasps – and take her at face value. They may have also seen the scandalised headlines surrounding her new album cover, Man’s Best Friend, showing the singer on all fours as a male figure tugs at a clump of her signature locks, which was swiftly branded as “degrading towards women” and “disgusting” by her critics.

As Carpenter put it, though, it’s just not that simple.

This is an artist who is layered, meticulously and intelligently so. Carpenter’s clever world is filled with self-deprecatory comedy, tongue-in-cheek theatrics, thinly coded euphemistic lyricism and Broadway-style dance moves. Onstage, she plays into the ditsy blonde archetype (when I saw her perform in London this year, she feigned doltishness as she bluntly asked the crowd: “So, you guys like tea?”). Carpenter will also take viral moments and satirise them: she responded to the backlash to her new album cover by releasing a more demure alternative to her album artwork that she quipped was “approved by God”. Not only is she in on the joke – she’s the one making it. In a pop landscape that is plagued by over-earnestness and a tiresome obsession with appearing authentic, Carpenter is the antithesis.

A child actor who had her breakthrough on the Disney spin-off