GIRL From RIO

Brazilian POP SENSATION ANITTA has topped CHARTS, set RECORDS, swayed ELECTIONS, and ACHIEVED a new kind of GLOBAL STARDOM by letting her LEGIONS of DEVOTED FANS into her LIFE with seemingly NO FILTER

- JULIANNE ESCOBEDO SHEPHERD

The biggest pop stars in the world cultivate an image, and the image is what fans buy into-what brings them to tears, what provides them ecstatic release. But the person inside the pop star is rarely an exact replica of the armor she wears. Anitta, the most globally influential Brazilian pop star since Astrud Gilberto sang "The Girl From Ipanema," is shrewdly aware of this. (Her own nod to Gilberto's classic, "Girl From Rio," went viral on TikTok.)

When I meet Anitta, she's fresh off a 10-hour flight from her hometown of Rio de Janeiro. She's running on negligible sleep after a jam-packed few days at Carnaval do Rio. Attending Carnaval as both performer and celebrant, Anitta documented a 26-hour stretch of the trip via Instagram for her 64 million followers: posing on a step-and-repeat at 7:00 a.m., twerking on a parade float by 9:00 a.m., dancing and doing the limbo poolside at 2:00 p.m., performing at a concert 12 hours later, in bed by the crack of dawn.

Yet when she emerges from the depths of an apartment in New York-a luxury condo overlooking Central Park that belongs to a fashion-editor friend-she seems rested. She is wearing a white T-shirt and cargo jeans. Her elegant tattooed fingers are tipped with a silver foil manicure. A brown hair elastic encircles her wrist. It's a disarmingly normal accessory for a pop star staying in a glitzy apartment, but it's one, I discover, that is more Larissa de Macedo Machado (Anitta's birth name) than her superstar alter ego.