MARIAH CAREY

As the musical powerhouse turns 50 in March, Amy Nelmes Bissett looks at the life of one of pop’s most enduring female icons

Ice-cold slush seeped through the holes of the woman’s trainers as she raced through the streets of Manhattan. With her cropped jacket wrapped tightly around her body, she looked like any other New Yorker trying to escape the snowstorm currently grinding the city to a halt.

It was October, 1987, and the snow arrived suddenly and without warning. Unseasonably early in fact, with the downfall becoming the earliest in recorded history. But even if the snow hadn’t taken the city by surprise that day, the young woman would still have worn the same outfit.

The short jacket over a T-shirt and stretch pants, all in black, and those battered trainers would be her only choice every day, no matter how bitter the New York winter got, until just over a year later, when Mariah Carey signed with Columbia Records, transforming her into a pop supernova.

Since then she’s hit some serious highs, figuratively (18 number one hits, more than 200 million records sold and a net worth of $754 million) and literally (her rare five-octave vocal range can hit the whistle registers, the highest note a human voice can reach).

And the multi-platinum pop singer still has those trainers, hand-medowns from her mother, now found in the sprawling shoe closet in her grand New York home. “The girl who had one shoe now has many,” Carey once remarked about the rows of designer heels she now owns.