"If you had said when I was in En Vogue that ‘you’ll be living in your car one day’, I’d be like ‘no, I’m always going to have an apartment": But former En Vogue singer Dawn Robinson is living in her car - out of choice

Dawn Robinson, who used to be one quarter of 1990s girl group En Vogue, has admitted she’s been living in a car for the last three years.

But this isn’t a riches-to-rags story of woe. Robinson says that, whilst at first it was out of necessity, she’s since adapted to the lifestyle and actually quite enjoys it. She’s uploaded a video in which she explains how she ended up in this position.

The singer had been staying with her parents in Las Vegas during the pandemic, but after her relationship with her mother hit the skids, she decided to move to Los Angeles. Initially, the idea was to stay with her manager, but when it became clear he didn’t have the room she ended up in a hotel. For eight months. That’s when Robinson started to become interested in a cheaper alternative.

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“I told my assistant one day, ‘I have been researching car life,’” she said. “I loved what I was seeing. There’s a whole community of people who live in their cars, in their RVs, in their vans.”

She admits that it was initially scary, and that there were a number of precautions she started taking - covering up the car windows and not divulging that she was on her own, for example. “I felt free. I felt like I was on a camping trip,” she said. “It was the right thing to do, I didn’t regret it.”

Robinson insisted that people shouldn’t feel sorry for her. “This isn’t like ‘poor Dawn, she’s living in her car and it’s terrible! Oh woe is me! I’m learning about who I am, I’m learning about myself as a person, as a woman. If you had said when I was in En Vogue that ‘you’ll be living in your car one day’, I’d be like ‘no I’m always going to have an apartment, I can’t live in my car’. We say that we can’t do certain things before we know we’re even capable.”

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Now 58, Robinson has had an up and down career. She was part of En Vogue during their initial run of success in the early '90s, but had left by the time of their third album, 1997’s EV3. She was then part of the short-lived R&B supergroup Lucy Pearl, before releasing a solo album, Dawn, in 2002. She rejoined En Vogue in 2008, but hasn’t performed with the group since 2011.

Clearly she’s putting a positive spin on her current situation. “I wouldn’t trade my experiences and what I’ve gone through for the world,” she says. “I miss my family, I miss everybody that I was connected to. But I needed to do this alone, without anybody’s judgement. I needed to do this for me.”

The current En Vogue line-up are on the bill for this year's Glastonbury Festival.