It's 9.10pm and Mariah Carey is late.
I'm in a phone-interview queue, waiting to chat with la diva about her latest collaboration: a jewellery line with Chopard.
“It seems that MC is talkative. It should be in about 20 minutes,” her French representative tells me. “Hope you are not sleepy,” she adds, worryingly.
It's Carey's first jewellery line since a range with the Home Shopping Network 12 years ago (her appearances on the channel were so extra, an edited video of them in which she says the word “moment” 35 times in a minute and a half went viral). This time round, the Happy Butterfly collection, co-designed with Chopard's artistic director, Caroline Scheufele, has 12 pieces of jewellery and three high jewellery pieces. And butterflies feature heavily. The symbol has become synonymous with Carey — now 53 and worth an estimated $320 million — since her 1997 album, Butterfly. But just as famous as her biggest songs (“Vision of Love,” “Hero”) is her image. From the urban legends about her (“I don't do stairs!”) to the episode of MTV Cribs where she showed viewers her lingerie cupboard and tried to exercise in stiletto heels, Carey has become known for being a diva, the Marie Antoinette of big ballads. Recently she surprised the Duchess of Sussex by calling her a diva on Meghan's podcast, Archetypes; Carey later clarified on Twitter: “Yes! I called her a diva in the most fabulous, gorgeous, empowering sense of the word.”
After a 40-minute wait (10 minutes in “diva” time), Carey's distinctive voice resounds over an audio Zoom link. With her video turned off, she is visually represented by a perfect azure blue and gold butterfly emoji and the legend “Mimi” above it (one of her many nicknames). It is… very Mariah.
As I follow her zigzaggy, stream-of-consciousness chat, I can hear drops of water in the background. Is she taking her calls from the bath? Of course she is. “Working with Chopard was a humongous honour,” Carey says (splash, splash) from her New York penthouse. “The pieces are major, daaaaahhhhling,” she sings/speaks. “I first spoke to Caroline [Scheufele] and we got into a detailed conversation about butterflies and she started sketching [the pieces] with three diamond strands on either side.”
Carey is quite a collector of jewellery herself — she started her own collection early on, encouraged by a matriarch figure she doesn't want to name. “She was fabulous and knew all the icons. She said, ‘You need to be wearing more diamonds!' So I bought myself a tennis necklace [a necklace featuring a continuous line of diamonds along a chain] — it's still in my collection. So that was quite the moment!”
“Moments” are quite a big thing in Carey-world and there are more happening. As well as the jewellery line, last month she released a special, 25th-anniversary version of Butterfly, which kicked off with a remastering of the video for the lead single, “Honey.” You know, the one where she did a “Jane Bond”, escaping from the clutches of a lookalike of Tommy Mottola, her first husband and the boss of her record company at the time, Sony, then jet-skiing into the arms of a male model. (She is currently with the dancer Bryan Tanaka and has two children — 11-year-old twins Moroccan and Monroe — with her second husband, Nick Cannon.) All the while dressed in Dolce & Gabbana and Gucci by Tom Ford. “In the video I was clearly inspired by Ursula Andress and all the Bond girls. It was fun to swim in Gucci heels,” she says (splash, splash).
By the time Butterfly came around, Carey had gone from wearing cardigans, pearls and jeans to tube dresses and slips while baring more flesh than she ever had before. In her 2020 memoir, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, she details how strongly Mottola controlled her image: making her wear a more demure wardrobe and signing off on imagery that kept her mixed-race heritage more “ambiguous” in order to appeal to a larger demographic. “It was the first video I had fun making,” she says now of “Honey.” Considering it was her 26th single release and seven years into her career, that is wild, to say the least. “You can really tell, if you watch the other videos, that I was more free and more obviously ‘me’.” (Splash, splash.)
Carey notes there has often been much ambiguity around her image. Growing up, she often felt out of place, something thatshe articulated through her hair. “I grew up thinking hair was supposed to look a certain way,” she says now. “As a mixed-race person with a black father growing up in predominantly white neighbourhoods, it was difficult. My black friends were able to do different types of treatments on their hair from the ones who were mixed. My white friends didn't have to do anything — they just woke up and their hair was fabulous. We didn't have conditioner in our house because my mother was like, ‘Whatever, it looks fine.’ Now I'm never far from a bottle of conditioner. I travel with one.”
As our interview wraps up (“That'll be your final question!” barks a faceless black square from my Zoom screen), I ask the “All I Want for Christmas Is You” singer if the Carey household has “gone seasonal” yet. “Christmas never ends for me,” she says, slightly manically. “But… it does really. I refuse to listen to Christmas music before a certain date and then, you know, it's the day … it's time,” she sings in a high-pitched voice. “I try to savour every moment when I can. Moments only.”
The mantra of Mariah? We can see it catching on.
