Photography by Richie Talboy Styling by Valeria Semushina Written by Naomi Elias Editor-in-Chief: Faith Xue Creative Direction: Ella O'Keeffe Hair: Clayton Hawkins Makeup: Ernesto Casillas using Prada Beauty Set Design: Alexa Polanco Styling Assistant: Oksi Belkasemi First Photo Assistant: Dominic Rawle Second Photo Assistant: Gracie Newman Production Company: Other Half Creative Executive Producer: Cara Scott Producer: Sarah Wald Production Assistant: Dylan Prabhu Executive Editor: Jordan Rossman Social Strategy Lead: Kala Herh Social Creative Lead: Natasha Sheridan Senior Design Director: Victoria Parrotta Digital Designer: Julia Mendelsohn
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Back at the shoot, Cameron is seated in a makeup chair as her hairstylist tends to her flowing “Lady Godiva” waves. She's still projecting the photo shoot’s romantic gothic aesthetic: muted lips, glassy almost-bare skin. And, a serenely happy energy. No sound was playing in the studio earlier but the silence was punctuated by Cameron’s voice occasionally donning funny accents and breaking into song, the Schmigadoon! star’s inner musical theater kid impossible to deny.
We’re days away from the release of the first single from her long-awaited debut album. “When in Rome” is a sunny, loved-up tune complete with a jaunty saxophone getting louder in a good way à la Carly Rae Jepsen’s 2015 hit “Run Away With Me.” “I think that the current happiness in my life has bled into my sound,” Cameron admits. “In 2024 when I was writing, I was in a very sort of 2010s pop space that I was really enjoying, but I doubt there's going to be too much of that going forward, not because I'm not happy, but because it's not really the type of music that I feel the most connected to.”
Cameron is best known for playing the lead role of Maleficent’s daughter Mal in Disney’s Descendants franchise and her dual roles on the teen sitcom Liv & Maddie, which won her a Daytime Emmy Award. She’s been releasing music in parallel to her acting pursuits—the American Music Awards named her New Artist of the Year in 2022—so it’s “funny,” she reflects, that this is technically her first album. “Finally having my debut album out feels amazing,” she shares, but “I am going back and forth between feeling like, oh my God, we finally got this thing over the finish line. I got all the green lights. Finally, I'm free to do what I want. And also it feels like a continuation of what I've been doing for so long.”
Her debut EP, Alchemical: Volume I, a collection of sultry dark pop songs and raw ballads, was met with a lot of praise when it was released in late 2023, but when the planned second volume went unreleased, fans began to speculate as to why. This is something she’s been wanting to clarify so she straightens up a little in her chair. “There was no secret Alchemical: Volume II that got wiped from the planet,” she deadpans like she’s shutting down an out-of-control conspiracy theory. “There are collections of songs that I wrote in that era that will probably eventually come out, but I've also written hundreds of songs that no one will probably ever hear.” For now, she offers, “you may as well treat the debut album like it's Volume II.”
Alchemical fans will be happy to hear her bright new lead single is sonically different from the remainder of the album, which she teases as “messier, darker” and “probably a little less commercial.” Think jazz-influenced vocals, choral swells, and more musical theater-influenced production. “I wouldn't say that it's easy listening,” she cautions. “This album is extremely confessional, more so than I've ever been.”
This is new territory for Cameron, who admits that while her breakout 2022 hit “Boyfriend” introduced her to a lot of new audiences and allowed her to open up about her bisexuality publicly for the first time, the songwriting process for it wasn’t all that emotionally rigorous. Sexy? Yes. Honest? Yes. Intense? No. The song was pulled “word for word” from a real-life moment that she was able to translate faithfully into lyrics. Any vulnerability she felt came after its release “when everybody reacted the way that they did,” she recalls. “I couldn't anticipate how exposed I felt and celebrated and loved, and supported.” It became her first non-Descendants song to land on the Billboard Hot 100, announcing a new musical identity for the rising star. Though it was lauded as a queer anthem and revealed an aspect of her many were unfamiliar with, Cameron maintains the song “did not feel confessional.” She also notes that “none of the songs I released last year felt confessional” either. Past releases like Alchemical’s “God’s Game,” which touched on emotional abuse, could be seen as confessional, but by her own definition, it and songs of that ilk are vulnerable rather than confessional. As Taylor Swift reminded us earlier this year during her Grammy Museum Icon Sessions interview, confessional songwriting is about being purposeful and delivering resonant lyrics that will “be an important story that sits in people’s minds, hearts and souls.” Cameron is fulfilling that mandate with songs that dig deeper than she ever has before.
Her new album feels freer because she came to a realization: “It's completely based upon me understanding that I don't have to hide behind heavy pop production. I don't have to make my voice more palatable. I was trying to fit myself into a box and not allowing myself to do very much outside of that. And then I realized I could just be a singer-songwriter.” The album spans memories from her whole life, opening with a song that takes us back to her small Washington hometown and the difficult ages of seven to 15, which longtime fans will know were turbulent due to Cameron experiencing major personal losses. It will also touch on experiences and connections fans aren’t aware of. “A lot of it is about past relationships, relationships that some people may know about and some that others don't,” she shares. The star’s love life has been widely dissected and documented since she was a teen, but, she hints, people still don't know as much as they think. “There are other people on this record that the public has no idea about. Things on this record that I've never talked about before,” she says. “I've been waiting to release this for so fucking long,” she sighs with palpable relief and excitement. She comes alive when teasing how forthcoming tracks like “Hands of Man” and “Good on You” will have disparate tones with one living in “a world of camp and fun and levity and silliness” and the other being a song where the singer admits “I'm talking about some of the darkest stuff in my life.” The tonal shifts make sense when you realize it’s the soundtrack to the life story of someone who has lived many lives on screen and off. It makes sense, too, that Cameron’s going all-out for the rollout. When Grammy-winning and Swift-approved confessional songwriter Sombr reached out to her team earlier this year about opening for his You Are the Reason tour, she jumped at the opportunity to work with an artist whose sound she feels is “in line” with her new one. “I’m very excited to play arenas,” she shares, “they’re my favorite stages to play!”
Cameron is an admitted obsessive. “I have sent in the most infinitesimal notes on every little thing, drums, things that probably no one's going to hear except for me,” she says. This attention to detail has ensured she’s “super proud of every single song” on her debut. “That’s how she is in general—very specific about sounds and it has to be the right guitar sound, the right drum sound,” confirms Ilsey Juber, a songwriter who has worked with Beyoncé and Kacey Musgraves and helped co-write “When in Rome.” But it’s Cameron’s starting point that stands out: “To have it start from poetry is a really unique way to do it,” Juber says. Fellow co-writer and close friend Madison Love describes Cameron arriving with journals full of rhymes and stories. “She doesn’t need help writing a song,” Love says. Cameron is “the real deal,” she says, noting that her role is “just trying to make the vision come to life, putting the poetry into a structure.”
According to Love, the album is “really personal, stuff that you wouldn’t just tell anybody about.” And, she adds, “I was very honored that she felt safe to tell us.” One of the songs that Cameron spotlights as “the most emblematic of who I am” is called “Breaks Open,” and she explains it as “the feeling like you are being pushed to the absolute edge of what you can take when it comes to trauma, pain, heartbreak, terror, darkness, and realizing that in that harrowing energy where you're like, I might explode from this, something terrible is going to happen if this continues, one more straw, I can't do it, there's that bridge that you cross where you say, Am I going to crumble? Become a ghost and a passenger in my own life? Or am I going to rip open and take care of all of these things that I have ingested, these energies and these entities?” The darkness she’s faced and survived “can feel like entities sometimes,” she explains, “it can feel like other worlds [like] in Spirited Away.”
Miyazaki's animated fantasy about a young girl braving a land of beasts and spirits is not the first movie Cameron references during the course of our conversation. “I figured out who I was through film and music,” she shares. The visuals for another upcoming track, “Do the Math,” which is about finding clarity about an old love who had been escaping accountability (“we both loved someone, it was you/ one big disaster takes two” she croons on it) are inspired by one of her al- time favorite movies: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. “I was always really obsessed with this sort of campy comic book on-screen fight title stuff and the Envy Adams character in particular with her space tails and her bangs,” she says. Other high-concept stylized movies on the mood board include Gunpowder Milkshake, Kill Bill, Kate, Everything Everywhere All At Once. Basically, female-fronted sci-fi and action projects that forgo gloss for aesthetics that are “grungy, dirty” and “a little bit fucked up.” This less dolled-up vibe is closer to her current real-life aesthetic. Cameron advised fans who caught a glimpse of her blonde roots in a recent TikTok to pretend they didn’t. The darker hair is here to stay, and not because she’s ‘gone goth.’ “I think every goth everywhere should be offended if I'm being called goth and I don't deserve the title. I'm not goth enough,” she says with a laugh. She arrived to set in a casually cool outfit, loose low-slung triple-waisted grey sweats and platform black shoes that gave her 5’2” frame a lift. Her small sculpted face, piercing eyes, and delicately tattooed hands finished the look, which would be at home in a lineup of playable characters in a futuristic or urban-set video game.
Not too long ago though, Cameron was getting tired of playing herself. “I always want to be a source of energy and reflection for people,” she explains, but “sometimes people can overestimate my ability to be a neverending well of connection.” The star is referencing a period of burnout she went through trying to meet the demands placed on her as a public-facing person. “When I don't have it, I really don't have it. And a lot of people don't understand that,” she explains. “In the public eye, sometimes that can result in people thinking I'm sad or I'm depressed or the light has left my eyes when in reality, I just have a lot more boundaries.”
“Who I am and who I was when I was a teenager, I'm still that person,” the now 30-year-old assures. But earlier in her career she remembers she “would walk around with my energy and my eyes and my heart and everything wide open” and as a result of that openness, she’d “energetically bleed out” in an unsustainable way. With age, the former child star has picked up a lot of wisdom about how she shares herself with the world. “I always feel like people have this big burning ball of light in their chest and you can turn it down or it can be blazing,” she explains. “I used to always be blazing and now I just realized that you are finite and you have to be the gatekeeper of where you let your energy and your magic go.” She equates it to being like a big door and finally figuring out, “I decide when I open up.”
The inner work Cameron’s done to become her own gatekeeper, ignore public perception and regulate access to her has resulted in a new normal she’s really happy with: “At the end of the day I have a soft life and I can sleep and recharge and not feel like I'm in a crowd of 7,000 people...work has to be work and life has to be life.” When the album drops, she’ll be ready to let everyone into the sonic world she’s inhabited all year and the big burning ball of light in her chest will warm us all.
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FERRAGAMO DRESS, MARINA DE GOLLE SHOES, STYLISTS OWN NECKLACE
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“I used to be really insecure that people found me not chill in some way, and now I don’t give a fuck.”
“I think that the current
happiness in my life has
bled into my sound.”
mcqueen top & pants
When Dove Cameron emerges from her dressing room at the industrial-chic L.A. photo studio where her cover story is being shot, she’s in a long white dress with delicate ruffles that a stylist is helping lift from behind. Her waist-length raven-black hair is trailing behind her in a look that feels pulled from a modern bridal magazine. “It's funny because when you're in a bridal era, anytime you put on white, it feels bridal,” she jokes to me after the shoot.
We’re only weeks away from her planned late September wedding to her musician fiancé Damiano David in his native Italy. “I'm pretty involved,” Cameron shares of the wedding planning. “Both my fiancé and I are really creative so there's nothing that we weren't involved in.” Further details are scant because the artist has been making more of a conscious effort to protect her private life. “I just reached a breaking point a few years ago when everything felt so invasive and a lot of my private life was really everywhere and everybody knew everything about me. And some of that was my own choice and some of it really wasn't,” she shares, reflecting on how overwhelming it was to have “big events that happened in my life on huge public scales and people forming opinions about me that were incredibly baseless off the mark and assigning value to things or creating storylines in my life that weren't real.” The experience taught her a valuable lesson: “every single person in the world cannot have a red editor's pen for your life.”
But, thankfully, fans weren’t left in the dark for too long because a tastefully curated selection of photographs of the Italian affair—which took place across three days and two venues including lush Tuscan winery Castiglion del Bosco—was shared with Vogue Weddings following the ceremony. Images of the bride’s custom silk and chiffon Valentino gown designed by Alessandro Michele spread across social media like wildfire. The sleek and romantic dress was topped with a showstopping 13-foot silk tulle veil hand-embroidered with celestial objects like a moon and stars as an ode to Cameron’s middle name, Celeste. And there was a special guest, her Descendants director Kenny Ortega, who officiated the wedding.
Cameron says she asked Ortega to officiate a couple of months before the ceremony. “Damiano and I knew we wanted it to be done by someone who meant something to one of us personally,” she explains. “It was his idea to have it be someone from my side, mostly because my father couldn’t be there, and because we were getting married in Italy, [and] some of my guest list couldn’t make it due to the time commitment and busy schedules.” Ortega emerged as an obvious choice. “I’ve been very lucky to have a large number of mentors and father figures alike, who stepped into my life in a nurturing role when I was looking for it,” Cameron shares. “Kenny will forever be one of the first people to see me for who I was, to choose me, nurture me, and help me become who I am.” And, the star half-jokes, “who is more of a showman than the Kenny Ortega?” When I spoke to Cameron weeks before, she had expressed a desire for the wedding to feel like “a big fun party.” It looks like she got her wish. She’s also come away from the experience with some sage advice for other brides: “Listen to everyone when they tell you to budget time for yourself on the day. I can’t tell you how fast it went and how much we wish we could live it all again.”
DOVE CAMERON
IS READY TO CONFESS
“I've been waiting to
release this for so
fucking long.”
Newly married and making her most revealing music yet,
Dove Cameron is deciding what to share—and what to keep for herself.
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