‘90s Musical Icon Looks 'Amazing' in Leather Pants on Recent Tour: ‘How Is She 50?'
'90s Musical Icon Looks 'Amazing' in Leather Pants on Recent Tour: 'How Is She 50?' originally appeared on Parade.
Alanis Morissette appears to have found a way to stop time.
The "You Oughta Know" songstress, who burst onto the scene—and defined it—in the 1990s, has never looked better, and fans are taking note.
The 50-year-old singer had fans scratching their heads and asking, 'How is she 50?' following a recent concert appearance in Peru. Morissette is currently in the midst of a world tour, performing classic hits like "Thank U" while putting her ageless beauty on display.Still rocking her signature long, flowing dark hair, the singer flaunted her effortless figure in a pair of slim leather pants—prompting one fan to comment on a social media post of the performance, 'Nobody looks better in leather pants.' Point taken.Morissette's fans haven't lost their fervor over time. Their devotion is about as timeless as her endless catalog of hits. One fan captured the enduring admiration perfectly, writing, 'My God, this woman never ceases to amaze me. She sounds and looks incredible. How is she 50?!?! Alanis is legendary," while another added, "she is legend . the voice still like 90's."
Alanis Morissette may look like no time has passed since the '90s, but listening to her performance, it's clear she sounds like no time has passed as well. What a voice.
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'90s Musical Icon Looks 'Amazing' in Leather Pants on Recent Tour: 'How Is She 50?' first appeared on Parade on Jun 17, 2025
This story was originally reported by Parade on Jun 17, 2025, where it first appeared.
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She has occasionally tried to live outside the state, 'briefly' on Bowen Island, Vancouver. And she tried New York for a year. 'But that Pacific Ocean, it keeps pulling me back,' she says. Yup, she's 'a Californian girl through and through'. By January this year, they had been living in Pacific Palisades in LA for just a few months when the wildfires tore through their neighbourhood, writing off their house and 85% of their belongings. More than 200,000 people were displaced. Many of her friends fled to New York, whole communities upped sticks. It was the ocean, the communal living vibe, the general feeling the feels that made her want to stay in California. The family initially found a temporary solution, living 'communally' with four friends between January and May. 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Or if we're talking about the conventional curriculum in public schools, or what the government's up to with education. I constantly reference multiple intelligences, because so many kids say, 'I'm really dumb.' And it kills me. I'm just like, 'What do you mean? Where are your intelligences? Where do you spark up? Where do you jump out of bed in the morning?' And it might be physical intelligence. It might be that you're meant to do backflips in a way that I'll never do. I'll need a stunt double for that. So I go through it with anybody who's across from me and seeking support.' She calls home school 'unschool', and the kids are allowed to opt into the mainstream the moment they choose. Ever, for instance, chose to go at seventh grade. I ask her to give me a flavour. 'Like, Winter will be singing to us his whole day, channelling his stream of consciousness. And then Onyx is twirling around the room. Artistry as a way of life is so normalised in our family. It's not like if one person's loving their academic moment, that isn't recognised. If someone's loving the backflip they just mastered, we're like, 'Awesome!' So there is a celebration of process here. Destination is fun, but process is everything. We value that here.' Morissette calls the people who help the family the 'caregiving gang', certainly a nicer way of putting it than 'nannies and tutors'. Everybody in that gang knows about the multiple intelligence system. 'What I've done is laminated maps and posters to indicate what each might look like. For example, musical intelligence might look like Souleye in the studio writing a song. He'll bring Onyx in, and she'll write a song, and he'll record it.' Naturalist intelligence is another. The family have a farm in northern California where they keep cows, turkeys, ducks, snakes 'and tons of chickens. Onyx is super knowledgable, to the point where, when I don't know a thing about an animal, I just turn to her. So we've got our naturalist intelligence there, our animal empath. I can't even keep a plant alive.' She loves the tranquillity of the farm, the peaceful escape. 'I love anywhere where there's a vortex,' she says. For a second, I think: vortex? The internet informs me that there's an alternative definition. A vortex in this context is 'a state of alignment with one's desires and source energy'. Morissette says she gets 'a little word salady sometimes. It's a linguistic issue.' She loves words, loves using them, 'but sometimes I play with them a little much'. She'll create words – tangentalise, decohesify – that intuitively seem to fit. How does she talk to her kids about the postpartum depression she experienced after all three were born? 'I apologise all the time. They'll say, 'I remember that whole era,' and I'll say, 'Well, I wasn't exactly available to show up for you in the full way that I wanted to.' I am pretty transparent about how I failed them. And my running joke, which is not a joke, is that I have accounts set up for their potential college fees, if that's the route they take, but I also have whole accounts set up for their therapy, because they're going to need it.' My hair is a band mate. It's a way of expressing and flailing and raging. It's a friend who protects me when I'm feeling vulnerable on stage She says interest in postpartum depression is better than it was, say, 30 years ago. 'But 'interest' isn't salve. Being interested in someone's suffering isn't the same as showing up for it. There's not a lot of education around anything feminine, but this one especially. So, it's rugged. But I really consider myself a sort of existential cockroach. There's a tenacity – I don't know where it comes from, probably my parents – to keep going.' She puts on a voice here of someone asking a question after the birth of Winter, when she was 45: ''Why would you get pregnant again if you've already been through it twice and it gets progressively worse?' I'm like, 'Well, look at my children. I'll do anything for these kids. To meet them, even, I'll suffer anything.'' She pauses then adds: 'It's also a generation X thing. We're known for our white-knuckle approach to fricking everything.' She's tugging the ends of her hair. I should say something about her hair. It's still long, brown, middle-parted and what the kids would call iconic in the way Janis Joplin's was, too. Morissette helicoptered it on stage, semi-dreaded it in You Learn, wore it as her only clothes in her video for Thank U. 'I mean, my hair is a band mate,' she says. 'It's a way of expressing and flailing and raging. It's like a typewriter, it speaks on my behalf. Without me, even. It's a friend who protects me when I'm feeling vulnerable on stage. If you have 80,000 or 200,000 people looking, a well-placed moment of deep' – she mimes retreating behind her hair – 'and then I'm back' – she mimes re-emerging – 'It's a pretty way of hiding. The perfect tool for an introvert. And I've always felt androgynous, so in some ways my earrings or my hair length can remind someone that it's a female body.' She doesn't mind when it's long and greasy, she likes the 'aesthetic of dirty chic' (I fear Glastonbury may test even the steeliest Californian). Plus, her hair supplied a fierce and tangible shift from the way she'd been moulded as a child star back home in Canada. * * * Born in Ottawa, Alanis Morissette was one of three children of teachers Alan Morissette and Georgia Feuerstein; her mother's family escaped the Hungarian revolution when she was 10. 'Basically, they were on a train, someone leaned over and said, 'Hey, we just want to let you know that every family getting off at the next stop is being taken away to be killed. Your family might want to jump off.' They did, looked back from the field, and saw everyone being executed.' Morissette has an older brother Chad, and a twin, Wade. By all accounts she was a child in constant motion, always spinning, singing. 'My twin brother used to joke he would be playing soccer while I was writing songs about fate,' she has said. She tells me two clear things about her early life. One that she had a 'prophetic' vision of herself travelling the planet and singing. 'That's what I saw as a very young person.' The second is that her 'psychological leanings' were always there. 'We all have our funny roles in our family, and my role was the 'psyche understander' and the conflict resolver. Some might think that made me the peacemaker, but really, I was just the family therapist. Which is exciting, but also horrifying.' (Does she still have that role? She laughs. 'I quit.' She mimes handing out other therapists' numbers, 'Here's a couple of business cards.') At the age of 10, Morissette – Lady Di hairdo and roll-up jeans – appeared in five episodes of the Nickelodeon kids' series You Can't Do That on Television. She used the money she earned to make her first album. At the same time, she was a competitive swimmer with a punishing training schedule. Not long after, she was signed by MCA, who turned her into a cringy pop princess bopping with Paula Abdul-style dance moves in a crucifix and bra top. She even opened for rapper Vanilla Ice. She was cutting records in studios until 3am and still attending school – even if the classroom desk was just a chance to catch up on sleep. Behind the teen gloss, of course, were the predatory men, the exploitative financial deals, the criticisms about her looks and weight. All this, in an era that celebrated size zero, cemented a severe eating disorder. After high school, she learned to play guitar and started writing songs. Aged 19, she moved to LA and spent her days trying to navigate a culture where no one asked her a question and just writing, writing, writing on the beach. Music was suddenly an outlet. Her lyrics were, 'psychologically, spiritually, emotionally informed'. She was signed by Madonna's label Maverick and Jagged Little Pill was released when she was 21, selling half a million copies in one week. Nonetheless, it was a 'rough time' to be a solo artist. 'There was no one to hide behind. What I found in terms of the lovely patriarchy, was that at that time if men couldn't fuck me, they didn't know what to do with me.' When she looked around her in the musical landscape, the people who seemed successful were 'secure in their loudness, à la Courtney Love. That seemed to be valued. I was like, 'OK, I'm going to pretend to be an extrovert for the next 25 years.' So, tequila – anything that allowed me to be the life of the party – or if I was doing a talk, Xanax. Anything that would help me pretend I'm not me.' I'm working micro-feminisms into every board meeting She takes a deep breath and says as if speedily wrapping up, 'And that's why perimenopause is so great, because now there's zero desire to present as something that I'm not. I spent 25 years trying to be someone who didn't have this temperament. At 51, I feel this is just what it is like.' She says that menopause is 'rough and amazing, both'. She interrupts herself to ask if I know about the micro-feminism trend, 'where you just impose the feminine on everything. It's anything's like, 'Oh, I need to talk to a doctor, because she'll tell me … ' I do it all the time. If someone sees a bug, 'Oh my gosh, she's gorgeous.' Because, obviously, patriarchy would have it be such that every fucking thing is male, including the creatures. I'm working those micro-feminisms into every board meeting.' She hates that the hyper-sexuality of the 90s and 00s is back. That 'size zero' is back. 'We thought that whole era was done, right? We sorted this out! Didn't we? Oh, we didn't. We dropped the ball. The collarbone thing came back in … and the hyper-sexualization thing is so boring.' She laughs: 'Of course, a perimenopausal woman's going to say that, right? My procreative imperative is, thank fucking God, chilling out. There are gorgeous things that come along with that – less people-pleasing, more directness. But I'm still in the middle of it. And that can be disconcerting. Most of my friends are in the middle of it, too, so we cut each other a lot of slack. My menopausal women friends are like, 'Honey, it gets fucking great.' It's the best news.' Morissette believes medicine should embrace all the woo-woo, including psilocybin (the hallucinogenic compound found in some mushrooms) or MDMA treatments for PTSD. 'I think it's all fantastic. The future in medicine – pharma is not maybe going to be so happy hearing this – is prevention, heading things off at the pass; understanding things hormonally, emotionally, circumstantially, relationally to past traumas. So that includes microdosing, ketamine, or whatever you need to do. We've come a long way; people know how to do this now, so I'm excited.' Does this mean her view of sobriety is nuanced? 'There are some people who would get very mad at me for implying at all that it's nuanced. Because for those of us who were drinking at seven in the morning, well there's nothing nuanced about that. So, I guess it depends. For me, it's whichever addiction is bringing you to death very fast. Which one is it? Which one's ruining your relationships? And then there's the Whac-a-Mole approach, which is, 'OK, I've stopped not eating. And now I'm working my ass off. Oh, yeah, and I took a few too many pills.' The Whac-a-Mole, that's what we have to keep an eye on.' She's looking ahead to Glastonbury, which is part of what she calls her 'summer of communalism'. She'll be travelling with her family and ever-expanding caravan of friends. When she takes to the stage, that long hair billowing, she expects to be wide-eyed, taking in the crowd in front of her, and 'beholding the shit out of everything'. • Tickets for Alanis Morissette's European tour are available to buy here. • In the UK, Action on Addiction is available on 0300 330 0659. In the US, call or text SAMHSA's National Helpline at 988. In Australia, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline is at 1800 250 015; families and friends can seek help at Family Drug Support Australia at 1300 368 186 • In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@ or jo@ In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at
