Trends & Culture
Zara Larsson on Creative Control, Glitter and Her Arena Ambitions
Zara Larsson details the Midnight Sun aesthetic, her first Grammy nomination and her push for arenas: "I want to build a world, an identity, a universe, a sound, a feeling."
Zara Larsson bought her Glossier clear gloss in bulk. "She's my girl," the 28-year-old Swede says of the product, which she stashes in her bags and jackets. It is one of the few constants between her off-duty and stage personas — off stage she pairs it with Revlon ColorStay Longwear Lip Liner in Nude, and on stage she wears enough body glitter, in her interviewer's words at a Chicago restaurant in July, "to dust a few acres of a Swedish forest."
Larsson makes no apologies for her maximalist aesthetic. "No, I'm slightly tacky. I love a little bit of tackiness," she says. "I love the sleazy [look]. Like Snooki, she's on the mood board for sure. Paris Hilton, like night out when it's five a.m., that shit. I've never been drawn to the clean girl."
Her current look, built around her latest album Midnight Sun, took shape after an appearance on RuPaul's Drag Race. "The keychains, the glitter, my little Zen top, the sparkles, the platform shoes… I was just like, That is Midnight Sun," she says. The album's title track earned Larsson her first Grammy nomination, for Best Dance Pop Recording. Her longtime collaborators include photographer and director Charlotte Rutherford and makeup artist Sophia Sinot, who has worked with her for around six years.
The fandom has absorbed the visual language. "It makes me so fucking happy to look out into the crowd, or even in my tagged photos on Instagram, and I see that people do the makeup — they wear the glitter, they have a little dolphin," Larsson says. The dolphin references a social media trend built on her song "Symphony" with Clean Bandit; Google now shows two leaping dolphins for searches of her name.
The visibility is new, but the career is not. Larsson has worked for almost 20 years. Born near Stockholm, she won Talang, Sweden's Got Talent franchise, in 2008 at age 10, and signed a record deal four years later. "My life, internally, doesn't feel that different. But then, of course, there are a lot of new eyes on me now, especially in the US," she says. Her 2015 single "Lush Life" went viral in November 2025, more than ten years after release, with TikTok posts using the track reportedly amassing over 14.5 billion total views. Figure skater Alysa Liu performed her exhibition at the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics to the remix of PinkPantheress' "Stateside," which features Larsson.
The momentum has not erased her ambition. At the first stop of her US tour in February, in Portland, Oregon, she found the stage — "a fucking pizza slice," in her words — misaligned with her goals. "It's not that it's embarrassing, but I felt like, 'Ugh, it would be so much nicer if I was playing arenas right now,'" she says. "I think it's just a disconnect when you have that vision for yourself, but in reality you're not there. But it's gonna be fun for people to follow me along on that journey."
She has also changed record labels ("It's all love," she says, but she needed a change) and is asserting more control over her work, from stage lighting to songwriting. "I don't want to go into a studio or sit at a meeting and feel like I'm 16," she says. "I think it made me feel like I couldn't trust in what I was wanting to do — or even actually entertain the thought of what I wanted to do because I thought, Well, what do I know?"
Backstage at The Vic Theatre, before a Lollapalooza Aftershow, that control is visible. She inspects her makeup in a pink hand mirror, debates lining her waterline and watches as Sinot freehands a cheetah-print motif on her eyelids with Caia liquid eyeliner. "She knows what she wants," Sinot says. Larsson settles on a magenta beaded skirt and a lilac bra with sequined floral appliqués, then returns to the New York Times crossword — her tactic, she says, for curbing screen time habits reported at 16 hours a day.
Larsson frames the current era as a reintroduction: Zara Larsson the seasoned artist, not the child star. "I want to build a world, an identity, a universe, a sound, a feeling," she says. The arenas have not arrived yet. On the evidence of this year, they are the next stop on the journey she has invited her audience to follow.
Original: knowyourmeme.com
Grace Kim
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Correspondent covering media and advertising at Eurasian Beauty Journal.
