A business school graduate with a master's in management ends up on the Eurovision stage in Kyiv. A woman trained to optimize quarterly returns stands before millions singing about loss. Alma, born Alexandra Maquet in Lyon on September 27, 1988, spent years building a corporate identity before dismantling it note by note. The French singer-songwriter turns 38 in 2026, but her path from Abercrombie & Fitch to Warner Brothers remains one of the stranger detours in contemporary pop music.
Her stage name came from the first two letters of her birth name, a compact signature that erased almost nothing. Alexandra Maquet became Alma, and with that compression she began the slow work of becoming someone else entirely. She was the eldest of four daughters, raised between France, the United States, Italy, and Brazil. Her father ran businesses; her mother, Marie-Pierre Maquet, worked as a contemporary artist under the name MPM. Art and commerce shared the same household, rarely resolving their differences aloud.
From Miami to Lille
At sixteen her family moved to Miami, where she spent a year in an American high school. Then she made a decision that surprises people the first time they hear it: she returned to France alone, still a teenager, choosing independence over the family unit. She enrolled at IESEG School of Management in Lille, finished her degree, and in 2011 received a master's in business administration and management. Somewhere in there she spent over a year on exchange at FEA-USP in São Paulo, picking up Portuguese alongside her coursework.
After graduating she landed in Milan, working as an assistant manager for Abercrombie & Fitch. By any conventional measure, the plan was working. She spoke French, English, Italian, and Portuguese. She had credentials that translated across borders. But Milan pointed her toward Brussels, and Brussels is where she began writing songs. The move had no market rationale. She simply needed a room where the only quarterly report was whether a melody survived the afternoon.
She simply needed a room where the only quarterly report was whether a melody survived the afternoon.
The deliberate unlearning
Then came the deliberate unlearning. She started taking lessons in singing, composition, solfège, and stagecraft, rebuilding herself from the fundamentals while her peers climbed corporate ladders. She navigated the music scene the way an economist studies a new market: observation first, then entry. Eventually Warner Brothers signed her, and in June 2016 she released her debut single "La chute est lente." The title alone announced her curriculum — slow descent as method.
Her album "Ma peau aime" arrived in 2017, alongside the single "Ivre." By then she had already been chosen to represent France at Eurovision that same year. The song "Requiem," written by Nazim Khaled, became her second single from the upcoming record. She performed it on the stage in Kyiv and finished in twelfth place. For a debut artist with no traditional conservatory training and a freshly minted pop identity, the ranking mattered less than the broadcast itself.
Economics as musical discipline
Listeners sometimes assume the economics degree was a backup plan abandoned the moment music worked. The timing suggests the opposite. She completed her education, worked the Milan contract, and only then turned to songwriting in Brussels. The discipline of management didn't collide with pop music so much as furnish it — structure, patience, a tolerance for delayed returns. Her fluency in four languages gave her an ear for prosody that few conservatory students develop.
The discography remains unusually thin for a Eurovision representative nearly a decade later. "Ma peau aime" stands as the central document, its title track and singles tracing what someone sounds like when she writes without a genre orthodoxy forcing her hand. Warner Brothers pressed the album in 2017, and the physical editions float through European resale markets with quiet regularity. No deluxe reissue campaign ever arrived to canonize the record.
The woman who left her family in Miami at sixteen, learned Portuguese in São Paulo, and worked retail management in Milan now lives inside a handful of songs and one performance in Kyiv. What does an economist hear in her own "Requiem"? The question lingers precisely because she never answered it in interviews. Alma turns 38 this year, and the next decision — whether to release again, whether the Brussels notebooks still hold unfinished material — remains entirely hers.