Ariana Grande lands her first-time Vogue cover as shot by Annie Leibovitz for the August 2019 issue. Shot beach side with her dog Toulouse, Grande wears a black Dior sundress with an over-sized, black straw hat by Eric Javits.
Grande joked about her dog’s appearance on Instagram where she wrote, “Thanks for allowing me to be in the background of Toulouse’s first Vogue cover.”
In an article titled “Ariana on Grief and Growing Up,” the 26-year singer/songwriter tackles the tough topic of Mac Miller, her ex-boyfriend who passed away in September 2018 from a drug overdose.
Discussing her performance at Coachella as a headliner earlier this year, Grande said the event holds a lot of emotion because of its association with Miller. She explained, “I was always a person who never went to festivals and never went out and had fun like that. But the first time I went was to see Malcolm perform, and it was such an incredible experience. I went the second year as well, and I associate…heavily…it was just kind of a mind fuck, processing how much has happened in such a brief period.”
On the subject of the fateful Manchester Arena concert where 23 concertgoers where killed by a fire bomb in May 2017, Grande pushed back on the implication the event marked a turning point in her career. With tears brimming, she stated, “It’s not my trauma. It’s those families. It’s their losses, and so it’s hard to just let it all out without thinking about them reading this and reopening the memory for them. I’m proud that we were able to raise a lot of money with the intention of giving people a feeling of love or unity, but at the end of the day, it didn’t bring anyone back.”
Reflecting on her fortunate yet tumultuous life, Grande concludes, “I have to be the luckiest girl in the world, and the unluckiest, for sure. I’m walking this fine line between healing myself and not letting the things that I’ve gone through be picked at before I’m ready, and also celebrating the beautiful things that have happened in my life and not feeling scared that they’ll be taken away from me because trauma tells me that they will be.”
