Adele has returned and is doing double duty.
The 33-year-old British singer is the cover star for the November issue of both American Vogue and British Vogue, published simultaneously Thursday, something that has never happened before in history, according to Vogue.
Photographer Alasdair Mclellan captured Adele wearing a vibrant and cascading green Valentino Haute Couture dress with Cartier earrings for the Vogue cover. For British Vogue, the “Chasing Pavements” singer was captured by Steven Meisel wearing a canary yellow dress, her hair coiffed in waves.
It’s been almost six years since the velvety songstress has released her last album “25” in 2015. But after teasing fans with a taste of her next single “Easy on Me” Tuesday, she confirms her next “sensitive” project is on the way.
“I always say that ’21’ doesn’t belong to me anymore. Everyone else took it into their hearts so much,” she said to American Vogue of her 2011 project which won a Grammy for album of the year. “I’m not letting go of this one. This is my album. I want to share myself with everyone, but I don’t think I’ll ever let this one go.”
In both cover stories, Adele talks about her struggles with anxiety, her 2019 divorce from Simon Konecki and her relationship with her son Angelo, 9.
“My anxiety was so terrible, I’d forget what I had or hadn’t said to Angelo about separating,” she said in the November cover for British Vogue. “Angelo’s just like, ‘I don’t get it.’ … I don’t really get it either. There are rules that are made up in society of what happens and doesn’t happen in marriage and after marriage, but I’m a very complex person. I’ve always let him know how I’m feeling from a very young age because I felt quite frazzled as an adult.”
She said her fitness routine helped with her mental health struggles.
“I realized that when I was working out, I didn’t have any anxiety. It was never about losing weight. I thought, If I can make my body physically strong, and I can feel that and see that, then maybe one day I can make my emotions and my mind physically strong,” she said in American Vogue.
But the results of using the gym as a coping mechanismhave also been frustrating for the 15-time Grammy winner.
“People are shocked because I didn’t share my ‘journey’. They’re used to people documenting everything on Instagram … I did it for myself and not anyone else,” she told British Vogue. “You don’t need to be overweight to be body positive, you can be any shape or size.”
Adele also detailed other events that gave her a lot of public attention in her double interviews like criticism for wearing Bantu knots and her Beyoncé shoutout at the Grammys.
“I totally get why people felt like it was appropriating,” she told British Vogue of the Bantu knots. “I was wearing a hairstyle that is actually to protect Afro hair. Ruined mine, obviously.”
Adele also admitted to crying in Beyonce’s dressing room, expressing admiration for her after winning album of the year for “25” against Beyonce’s “Lemonade.”
“I just said to her, like, the way that the Grammys works, and the people who control it at the very, very top—they don’t know what a visual album is. They don’t want to support the way that she’s moving things forward,” she said.
She told American Vogue her golden gramophone arrived in the mail broken, but she never got it fixed. Instead, she welded it with a nod to the person she thought deserved the award.
“There’s a lemon in it,” she added.
