Anitta is from Brazil, and this entire photo shoot seems to take that as inspiration, as if they plonked her in the middle of the rain forest. It is… not the most dynamic experience? And at times feels more confining than the right art direction for “The Freedom Issue.” I didn’t know much about Anitta beyond how much she’s exploded onto the event scene in the last two years, so I’m glad to see her landing a big cover, and thus, a big profile. There’s a lot of ink given to her political activism, which helped lead to an outpouring of the youth vote in Brazil’s big election in 2022, and also the divide between her private self and the Anitta she’s created for show — from personal lines drawn, to just the marketing choices she feels she has to make:
“I dance, ass to the sky, and it sells more,” she tells me. “People love to complain: ‘Oh, this person’s so vulgar.’ But that’s what they like. Besides everything, I’m also a businesswoman. I’m an artist. I know how to get onstage and make everyone jump, make everyone do what I want. I know it sells.” Anitta mentions that she has told some media that she learned to speak five languages by dating men from far-flung locations. In reality, though, she has hired language tutors to travel with her, helping her multitask her way to various levels of fluency while she’s in hair and makeup. “[People] don’t have the courage to say what they want,” she explains. “They want to laugh and talk about the girl who said, ‘Oh, I learned to speak with boyfriends.’ If you put that in a quote, a million clicks. If you put ‘Oh, she put different teachers in the dressing room so she could learn while she was getting glam,’ nobody’s going to fucking click on that.”
I would click on that! But, I get where she might think I’m in the minority there — it’s honestly fascinating to have the curtain pulled back even a little.
