The rebirth of Celine Dion: ‘Life is short. Can we just have a good time?’

Celine Dion warned me not to sit on the couch. Not unlike Vegas, which Dion helped rid of its musty Wayne Newton vibe, pop music has changed immeasurably since then; Dion’s brand of ultra-polished uplift — as heard in chart-topping anthems like “The Power of Love,” “Because You Loved Me” and the Oscar- and Grammy-winning “My Heart Will Go On,” from “Titanic” — feels even further from today’s gloomy, hip-hop-attuned Top 40 than it did from the chipper late-’90s era of Hanson and the Spice Girls. Yet something unexpected happened on this veteran entertainer’s path toward pastured irrelevance: Dion was reborn as a proudly avant-garde style icon known for flaunting audacious outfits on Instagram and at highly photographed events like May’s Met Gala in New York, where she was seen in an elaborate Oscar de la Renta get-up involving sequins, a feathered headpiece and what one fashion critic described as “sleeves draped in 3,000 strands of floor-length fringe made from micro-cut glass bugle beads.” The Dionaissance, it’s been called, a phrase Dion herself approves of, even if she claims not to know precisely how it originated. “She’s in a really good place,” said Stephan Moccio, a songwriter and producer from Ontario, Canada, who’s known Dion for years and worked on “Courage.” “The love of her life is gone, but I think she’s found this unique confidence — this kind of emotional wisdom — that we’ve never seen before.” In her dressing room, Dion said she worried at first that songwriters, knowing she’d lost her husband, would send her only “sad song after sad song after sad song.” “The loss of my husband is still in me,” she said of Angélil, whom she married in 1994 and with whom she had three sons. “Can we just have a good time?” Before the concert, I’d walked around the arena to get a sense of who comes to a Celine Dion concert in 2019 — to find out, in other words, whether her rediscovery by young people online has translated to the real world.