The surreal rise of Alex Porat

For someone who grew up on the internet, Alex Porat has an easy, level confidence in real life. She came of age at a time when a grainy YouTube video could launch a 12-year-old kid from Stratford, Ont., to stratospheric fame, when a mom holding a digital camera was just as viable a route to celebrity as a studio-recorded mixtape. Following in the footsteps of Justin Bieber, Conan Gray, Alessia Cara and countless others, Porat started out on YouTube, posting covers of show tunes and Selena Gomez songs. And, like any good Gen-Zer, the 27-year-old singer-songwriter is still chronically online.

Porat has been winning airplay in Canada and beyond with her ridiculously catchy yet vulnerable pop songs about problematic guys, crushes, heartbreak and young love. She released her latest EP, crushed!, in June, and is spending the fall touring the new tracks across Canada and the U.S. (the situationship-inspired single, Face Like Yours, cracked number 15 on Billboard’s Top 40 list). On social media, she posts a steady stream of cool-but-relatable-girl content: pre-show Get Ready With Me videos, outfits that blend early-2000s style with today’s baggier silhouettes, snaps from studio sessions, clips from live shows.

Porat has joined a growing cohort of 20-something female pop stars who are dominating music streaming and wielding enormous cultural influence. At the apex of that group are global megastars like Sabrina Carpenter (with nearly 50 million Instagram followers), Olivia Rodrigo (39 million) and breakout Canadian singer Tate McRae (8 million and counting). When it comes to the business of being a modern musician, which is often as much about packaging and selling a personal brand as the music itself, it is young women who are leading the charge.

Born in Malaysia to a Chinese mother and Polish father, Porat and her family briefly lived in the U.S. before moving to Vancouver and, later, Toronto. As a kid, she performed at the Crystal Mall in Burnaby on weekends – a gig she kept up for years. The stage was in the food court of the Asian mall, and the young performer belted out pop diva hits by Whitney Houston, Celine Dion and Mariah Carey while mall-goers lunched on noodles and dim sum.

Growing up, Porat struggled with her mixed-race identity. “I thought I looked so weird as a kid,” she told me when we met at Skyline Restaurant in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood in September. “You’re just looking in the mirror and thinking, ‘I don’t look like anything that exists.’” That feeling of otherness extended to her early experiences in the entertainment industry, too. Porat would attend open casting calls, only to find that there weren’t roles for mixed-race actors. “When you’re going to a casting as a kid and you look a little Asian, they’re like, ‘Oh, well, the parents in this commercial are white,’” she says.

The rejections piled up, but Porat wasn’t done trying. “I got really used to it,” she says. “I was like, whatever, another [rejection], whatever.” After high school, she briefly studied marketing in the hope that it would help her launch her music career before deciding to give music one last shot. When she was younger, she had started posting videos of her singing to YouTube with her mother’s help, and she decided to double down on the platform. She followed a disciplined posting schedule and took cover requests from her followers, which grew with the success of a few viral videos. Today, she has 1.2-million subscribers on the platform.

It was through those videos that her manager, Laurie Lee Boutet, found her in 2019. Trawling YouTube for untapped talent, Boutet, who also manages Toronto rock band the Beaches, came across Porat’s profile and was impressed by what she saw. She reached out, and the two met for coffee.

“Immediately, I just found her super captivating,” Boutet says. “She’s like that nice, cool girl in high school that you’re like, ‘You’re not allowed to be that nice because you’re so cool and beautiful.’”

Boutet chalks the success of Porat’s music up to relatability. “It’s very catchy, it’s very fun, but I think she writes about stories of heartbreak or crushes that everyone goes through,” she says. Part of Porat’s appeal is also her natural sense of style. “Alex is super fashionable and has amazing taste,” Boutet says. “She does a great job of styling herself.”

For Porat, clothes are a way to empower herself when she’s performing. “I realized somewhere in the last three years that I feel the most confident when I’m onstage,” she says. To that end, she keeps a separate closet for show clothes – big boots, dance tights and more daring pieces like leather booty shorts and corset tops. The clothes aren’t costumes; they’re still her, just a slightly bolder version of her.

She often accessorizes the playful looks with a pink hair roller. Porat uses a roller to style her bangs, and after posting a photo of it on social media, fans began showing up to her shows wearing their own rollers. “It’s become a silhouette for my fan club,” she says.

As any independent artist will tell you, social media can be a double-edged sword: platforms like TikTok and Instagram grant musicians control over their own images and facilitate immediate, intimate relationships with fans. At the same time, self-promotion can be an all-consuming, tireless exercise. At one point during our interview, Porat pulled out her phone to show me a screenshot of her Screen Time app, which had clocked 17 hours in a single day.

“Three hours on Instagram, one hour on e-mail, two hours on TikTok,” she says, scanning the breakdown. “Wow. I’m like, ‘That’s not okay.’”

But for Porat, social media is still a net-positive in her life. “I think because I grew up using YouTube, I don’t think of it as this toxic, terrifying thing,” she says. “The opportunities are literally endless with social media.”

Her October show at The Great Hall in Toronto was evidence of that. Porat took the stage in a cutout denim top, black hotpants and slouchy, knee-high leather boots. Her usually wavy hair was pin-straight in the mode of 2000s-era pop icons like Christina Aguilera and Avril Lavigne. The crowd was pocked with pink hair rollers.

From the moment she stepped out, Porat was transformed from the quietly confident woman I’d met earlier into a crowd-commanding powerhouse pop entity. It was like she was performing for an audience of a couple hundred thousand instead of a couple hundred, infecting the room with her magnetic energy and punchy anthems about bad dudes and breakups. It was clear that she was having a blast. All she needed, it seemed, was a bigger stage.

Fashion editor: Nadia Pizzimenti. Makeup and hair by Jordan Giang. Manicure by Wendy Rorong for Sidia/Plutino Group. Photo assistant: Marc Santos. Styling assistant: Shae Holt.