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Adele last week announced that she would be taking a considerable break from music when her Las Vegas run reaches its 100th and final show in November. “My tank is quite empty at the minute,” she said in an interview with the German broadcaster ZDF ahead of a 10-date residency in Munich. “I don’t have any plans for new music at all. I want a big break after all this and I think I want to do other creative things, just for a little while. You know I don’t even sing at home at all. How strange is that?”
The musician already seems to be dipping her toes into life-post Caesars Palace. She was this weekend photographed at a Team USA basketball game in London—dressed in an outsized, tangerine-orange shirt, wide-legged trousers and slingback kitten heels—and was later spotted leaving the Chiltern Firehouse in linen tailoring with a gold Bottega Veneta Mini Jodie bag and Jimmy Choo’s Amel pumps. If Adele’s Las Vegas uniform was a controlled and considered directive of all-black Schiaparelli, Valentino and Ferragamo gowns, her “retirement” wardrobe represents an emphatic break into color and Nike Jordans.
Adele—being Adele—could quite easily continue to fill entire arenas if she wanted to, but her decision to take a step back from the spotlight is a lesson in self-preservation. “There’s nothing weak about knowing your own mind or being able to set boundaries,” wrote Claire Cohen when the former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern stood down in 2023, citing the same “I no longer have enough in the tank” turn of phrase. “Understanding yourself well enough to bail out,” Cohen argued, “takes strength.” Concert organizers will next month attempt to set a Guinness World Record for the largest outdoor screen of all time when Adele performs before 74,000 people in Munich, with a pop-up “English pub” on the sidelines. “I miss everything about before I was famous,” the musician added in that television interview. “I think probably being anonymous the most.”