This story is taken from i-D’s limited edition print zine starring Rosé photographed by Larissa Hofmann, with custom stickers by Sara Rabin. Buy your copy here.
It’s 10.30pm on a school night in the West Village, and Rosé is teaching me how to eat caviar. It arrived at the table atop a rarefied take on chips and dip sent over compliments of the chef; we missed it at first, instead going straight for the gigantic brown crisps due to extreme hunger, mine from a day of doing basically nothing and hers from a day in which she’s visited a bunch of the biggest streaming services in the world and at least one of the biggest newspapers in a bid to make her new album as successful as it can possibly be. “Oh my God, there’s caviar! We missed all the caviar!”, Rosé screams when she spots the glossy black pearls. When I tell her I’m scared to try it, she immediately becomes firm: “Have it with a big piece! Otherwise you’re not actually gonna taste it,” she says, her broad Australian accent taking on an emphatic tone, like she’s my babysitter and I’m a kid refusing to eat my veggies. “Get a fork and like, scoop it up.”
Right now, Rosé seems more like Coach Rosie – a more playful and boisterous side of herself than she ever showed in Blackpink, the megastar K-Pop girl group with whom she became an instant global star in the mid-2010s. In that band, she fit a classic girl next door mode, speaking warmly to the crowd while headlining giant festivals like Coachella or singing soaring hooks on hits like “How You Like That” and “Boombayah”. Her debut solo album Rosie, set for release in early December, showcases the jocular side of Rosé that’s cheekily peer pressuring me into trying caviar in addition to numerous other facets: across 12 sleek pop songs, which run the gamut from stuttering 90s-style R&B to glossy synthpop and raw balladry, Rosé unravels all the thrills and heartaches of her early 20s, revealing herself as a deft surveyor of youthful emotion.
Rosé and I have met at Le B – a restaurant The New Yorker described as “opulence theatre” due to its lavish use of ingredients like foie gras, truffle, and the aforementioned caviar – to gab about Rosie over tart, pale pink Cosmopolitans. (She has long loved the drink, since before she even saw Sex and the City, to the point that she thought about naming her fanbase “Cosmos” before landing on “Number Ones”.) It is a high stakes time for Rosé, preferred name Rosie, real (English) name Roseanne Park, real (Korean) name Park Chae-young, hence the cocktails: this interview is a simulation of a stress-relieving girls’ night after a week of gruelling promo, complete with extensive discussion of dating, working and Bruno Mars. (Is that what happens at a stress-relieving girls’ night?)
She might not be off the clock by any means, but tonight Rosé, swaddled casually in a giant leather jacket – one of a few she’s been wearing lately – seems a lot looser than when we met a couple of days earlier during the shoot for this story, when she seemed exhausted and slightly on edge from a day of uncomfortable shoes and non-stop content production. (Between takes, that is – when the cameras are on, you’d never know.) At Le B, the lights are dim, and Rosé’s team is seated a few tables away, out of earshot.
This promo jaunt has featured “a lot of anxiety attacks”, she says, and a lot of worry that, given the first chance to present the real Rosie, she’s blown it. “I was just a bit in my head – I was like, ‘I think everything’s good’, but then because I was feeling great, I was like, ‘Wait, what if the whole thing’s just fucked up?’,” she says. Although Rosé rarely seems tense – she is prone to whole-body fits of guffaws, during which she dramatically lurches herself forward – she is a five-foot-five bottle blonde ball of nerves. “I’ve been so excited to promote Rosie for such a long time that it kind of all came out in word vomit.”
Nervousness pervades Rosé’s most innocuous opinions. She loves food, for example, but won’t identify as a foodie because “I know proper foodies”; she adores Sex and the City, “but I’m scared to say fan, because fan usually means like, you have to know like, every episode.” (For reference: Rosé says that all her friends insist she’s a Carrie.) Toxic is a favoured descriptor for various aspects of her life; she uses it 16 times over the course of our conversation, mostly to describe her relationship with her own career and, as much as she loved it, her time in the studio recording Rosie.
Rosie was recorded over the past year in Los Angeles, miles removed from Blackpink’s homebase of Seoul, in the months following the conclusion of Blackpink’s year-long, 66-date Born Pink world tour. It was the group’s biggest run ever, during which they became the first K-Pop act to headline Coachella. Afterwards, Rosé says, she felt lost; she decamped to California, and found that working on her own music, outside the hyperefficient structures and heavy A&R-ing of K-Pop, shook her out of her post-tour comedown. “The album process was very therapeutic, it was the only place I felt sane. That’s why I did it for a year. I felt like I was being held by mum, or something,” she says. “There [were] bad days when I felt like I needed that [security] back, because I know what it feels like when I’m being, like, hugged and cradled.”
“The album process was very therapeutic, it was the only place I felt sane. That’s why I did it for a year. I felt like I was being held by mum.”
For all the excitement of working in Los Angeles for the first time, making Rosie was an isolating experience. “I was going back and forth from hotel to Airbnb, and that was really lonely. It’s so funny how I’ve chosen to forget the negative times – the many, many nights of me crying myself to sleep,” she says. “It’s like I’m forming this – not toxic – but toxic relationship with [music], because I’m obsessed with it, and sometimes it doesn’t work, but I need it in my life.”
Part of Rosé’s stress around the creation and release of Rosie draws back to the fact that it’s solely her name on the cover. She describes her fellow members of Blackpink – Lisa, Jennie and Jisoo – as her sisters; in reality, they’re that and more. They trained in the K-Pop trenches together; they weathered years of rigorous touring; they are the only four people in the world who know what it feels like to be in the most famous K-Pop girl group of all time. Working alone, Rosé says, under more focussed scrutiny from the outside world, left her feeling intensely vulnerable.
The opening song on Rosie, “Number One Girl”, deals with that vulnerability directly; it is a sharp contrast with Blackpink’s music, which is hardened and confident, almost always on the offensive. Here, the way Rosé expresses her need for validation from the outside world feels unexpectedly raw: “Tell me I’m that new thing/Tell me that I’m relevant,” she sings over doleful piano.
“Number One Girl” was written on a day when all Rosé could really think about was how she was being perceived by the public. “I had been on the internet ‘til like 5am – I couldn’t sleep because I was so obsessed with what these people were gonna say about me and what I wanted them to say about me,” she recalls. “I was so disgusted at myself for it – I never wanted to admit it to anyone, I didn’t even want to admit it to myself. But I had to be fully honest in the studio.” For songwriter Amy Allen, who worked on the album, “Number One Girl” is Rosé “in a nutshell.” “Being a massive pop star, there’s so many things to be constantly juggling and handling, and having your personal life as well – it’s [like] a revolving door,” she says. “I think it’s really scary to dig into that sometimes, but it seemed to me as though the mission statement was always just to try and approach it with as much honesty as humanly possible.”
It’s easy to be sceptical of the idea that someone like Rosé – quite literally one of the most successful musicians of all time, given that Blackpink’s songs have been streamed some 13 billion times on Spotify alone – could let outside opinion get to her, until you remember the tangible realities of being the third-most followed K-Pop idol on Instagram. Fans are the genre’s lifeblood; they make or break stars, and they can feel intense ownership over their favourites. The comment sections of Rosé’s old posts are littered with messages from irate fans chastising her for the way she’s navigated her solo career. The most vocal fans hate that she took so long to release solo music and feel like she made a misstep by signing with The Black Label, an offshoot of Blackpink’s longtime record company, YG Entertainment, for solo management, unlike the other Blackpink members, who each founded their own management companies.
At Le B, she talks about this pressure from her fanbase without a hint of self-pity in her voice. “[The criticism] keeps me up a lot, but it’s only because I love my fans so much. It does eat me alive,” she says placidly. “They can get impatient, which I totally understand, but at the end of the day, I’m human. When I feel misunderstood, I feel the most weak and sad. Anyone who calls me Rosie, who knows me as a friend or family, knows I am a workaholic. To be called lazy…”
She trails off for a moment. I clarify: They call you lazy? and she quickly demurs. “No – but I understand it can happen. I’m still, at the end of the day, just a 27-year-old girl trying to survive her 20s, and I’m still trying to figure myself out,” she says, exasperatedly. “[Criticism] didn’t really phase me for the first few years of my career, and I woke up one day feeling like ‘Oh my God, it does affect me.’ I was like, ‘Wow, I’m human. I really am a vulnerable little girl’.”
She explodes with laughter again, leaning forward in her chair. “I’m hoping this album shows people that I’m just like you, I’m just like everyone else. Do you know a 27-year-old Asian girl who dyes her hair blonde? I’m probably like her! I’m not any different to your everyday 27-year-old girlie, literally, like, my emotions are the same.” she says.
The way Rosé describes these emotions is incredibly vivid, but she’s very good at keeping the real-life catalysts for those emotions vague – all those nights in LA when she cried herself to sleep, for example. Even so, she’s nervous – towards the end of our dinner, she makes a request, sticking out her hand and binding it with a pinky promise: “Just promise me – I’m not going to, because I’m a very open girl – but if I ask you for any part [to be removed] it’ll be after soooo much thinking and considering. Will you help me if I’m like ‘This part might be a bit dangerous’?”
“How does a K-pop superstar date? No comment”
Rosé may feel no different than you or I, but her upbringing was defined by exceptionalism. She was born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1997, when the city’s population was just over 1m people; Lorde was born just a few months prior, meaning that for a couple of years in Auckland you were about 20 times more likely to give birth to a future popstar than to win the lottery. When she was seven, her family moved to Melbourne, Australia, where she started playing guitar and singing in the church choir, and at 15, she flew to Sydney to audition at an open casting call for YG Entertainment. She came first out of nearly 1000 participants; almost immediately, she moved to Seoul, and began the back-breaking training required to become a K-Pop idol. She’s only been back to Melbourne twice, both times on tour with Blackpink. “Seoul feels like home for now, but I feel like home is where work is. I feel like a gypsy right now – Is that a word that’s okay? – I really do,” she says.
Even so, her social calendar in the US is getting busier by the day. Last September, she was photographed leaving Electric Lady Studios after an impromptu hangout hosted by Jack Antonoff, where guests included Taylor Swift. The meeting felt fortuitous; Rosé was in the midst of working out her solo career, and Swift was more than happy to give her advice. “I told her I’m such a huge fan and I just had some questions. As soon as she met me, she’s like ‘Spill, let me help you out,’” she recalls. “She gave me her experiences and was so ready to help me. She gave me her number and she’s like, ‘Let me know if you have any questions.’ Who does that? Like, you’re Taylor Swift!”
“I’m really grateful for her because I was at a moment where I was drowning a little,” Rosé says. “She is literally the coolest, and she’s such a girl’s girl. She was telling me – make sure to take care of this, this and this – like, logistics. She was trying to protect me. Me becoming solo, being independent, it’s not an easy thing. There are a lot of things I should be careful with, and she gave me a rundown on all the things I have to look out for. That was the coolest part – she’s killed it in the game, and she was kind enough to walk me through.”
It makes sense that Swift would see a kindred spirit in Rosé, whose ultimate goal, she says, is to translate the vulnerability of being a 20-something woman in the public eye into rich, broadly relatable art. “At the end of the day, I’m just a 27-year-old girlie who’s living through the last chapters of her 20s, and it’s still not easy. I guess we have three more years to find out if life gets better, or if it’s gonna be like this forever,” she says, becoming animated. “I feel like we’re still young and dumb!”
I suggest that maybe we’re just in a state of arrested development, having lost the first few years of our twenties to Covid, and she enters pop philosopher mode. At this point, she’s half a Cosmo deep and embracing her Carrie mentality. “Do you think everyone experienced their most toxic life during Covid? They may have,” she says, gasping cartoonishly. “That should be a trend on TikTok! Everybody talking about their Covid relationship! Like, ‘Hi, I’m Rosie, and this happened to me during Covid.’ I bet everyone is traumatised – everyone is traumatised.”
I ask if – as a quintessential “27-year-old girlie” – she partakes in dating much. “I’m like, more of a relationship-er, which is why people say ‘Rosie, you’re still so young’ – Like, I’m very serious about dating.” She pauses. “You know what, I’m getting into too much detail.” How, I ask, does a K-Pop superstar date? Like, is there an app? “No comment.”
Rosé catches herself like this a few times during our conversation, in a way that makes it seem like she is still working out how to toe the line between the relative transparency expected of mainstream western stars – the kind of openness that a nakedly emotional album like Rosie would probably warrant – and the closed-off perfection that’s de rigeur in K-Pop. At one point, I express surprise that she was allowed to release a song like the drinking-game-inspired “Apt.”, the lead single from Rosie, due to rules around decorum for K-Pop idols. “I think drinking is not bad. It’s more like… dating,” she says glumly, before quickly changing the subject. Later on, I ask about what she thinks of NewJeans’ recent revolt against Hybe, their label, over the shafting of their executive producer Min Hee-jin. With a mouthful of Tasmanian sea trout, she raises her eyebrows and shakes her head in a tiny motion. “I want to talk about positive things. I love those girls so much.”
As soon as Rosé “no comment”-s my dating app question, she’s saved by the bell: Her phone flashes, alerting her to a FaceTime notification. It is Bruno Mars. “Oh my God,” she says, as she answers the phone. “Bruno, I’m—What? I’m out right now, but I’ll check it. Can I call you later? Okay, I’ll check the email.” She hangs up and apologises; I immediately accuse her of planning the call to add colour to the piece; she denies it emphatically. Rosé first became aware of Mars’ music a year ago, after her friend asked if she wanted to see him live in Seoul; after the show she was “shocked” to find that she was actually “a huge fan, apparently. I knew all the songs!”
She had so much adrenaline that night that she forced her friends to stay out with her til midnight; eventually, she got a cab home, only to find that a friend had invited her to an afterparty that Mars would supposedly be at. “I said ‘Bruno Mars would never go to the afterparty.’” she recalls. “Then my friend texts, and she’s like ‘He’s here.’ I tell the taxi driver, ‘Please take me back to where we were.’ We drive all the way back, and there were so many fans outside. I literally walk through the crowd in my hoodie, nobody with me, 2am, and I get inside like, ‘Where is he?’ And they’re like, ‘He left an hour ago.’” She squeals. “They catfished me into coming to the party!”
When she signed to Atlantic, she found out that he was on the label too; he asked if she could pitch him three songs and she sent “Apt.”, Rosie’s bombastic, fiendishly catchy lead single. He took the song, rearranged the whole thing, and added a verse; it became a huge hit in its first week, debuting at No 8 on the Billboard Hot 100. “It’s so random – I knew it would shock people, I knew people would want to dance to it, but I just didn’t know that everyone would jump on it so quickly after the release, because we teased it so last-minute,” she tells me a few weeks later, a point at which the song has been the biggest in the world for a few days. “I’ve been very overwhelmed with all the love, and I’m very grateful.”
Rosé genuinely does speak about her success, with Blackpink and now under her own name, as if it’s all a surprise to her – it doesn’t feel like she’s bluffing when she says, as she has numerous times over the course of dinner, that she just feels like an average 27-year-old girl. Now, as dinner wraps up, she has to go do average 27-year-old things: go to the restaurant’s kitchen to take a photo with the chef, who is a huge Blackpink fan, and say bye to her team before they get a red-eye flight back to Seoul.
Rosie doesn’t necessarily showcase this more glamorous, jet-setting side of Rosé’s life but it does reveal the interiority and occasional loneliness that comes alongside it. If Blackpink was all armour, Rosie is all soft underbelly, vulnerable and playful in equal measure. “I wanted Rosie to portray what I live and breathe. I feel like Blackpink was my alter ego – I grew up watching Beyoncé performances, when it would take like, two hours to load videos on YouTube. I’m obsessed with that, and I’m so grateful because I’ve been able to live that life for almost a decade, and it still is the best thing,” she says. “But then Rosie, on the other hand, would be the girl who was downloading it at home. This is all me. Blackpink was the dream, Rosie is still the dream. I feel like they both represent me so well. And I mean, that’s why I always say: I’m a grateful little girl.”
Credits
Photography by Larissa Hofmann
Styled by Spencer Singer
Written by Shaad D’Souza
Hair: Seonyeong Lee
Make-up: Jungyo Won
Nail Technician: Mei Kawajiri
Set Design: Patience Harding
Digital Operator: Alec Luu
Tailor: Lindsay Amir
Photography Assistant: Pierre Lequeux
Fashion Assistant: Jemma Fong and Nick Trotta
Hair Assistant: Seunghyeon Lee
Make-up Assistant: Juhyeon Son
Set Design Assistant: Caroline Jackson
Production: Penny Projects
Production Coordinator: Jansan Pierre