Vogue magazine is a reputable fashion magazine headquartered in the United States.
United Kingdom
October, 2009
Lady Gaga was featured in a UK edition of the magazine. The interview took place on July 5, 2009 in the UK.
Go Gaga
A self-styled "good Catholic girl" and "New York avant-garde fashion monster", Lady Gaga has stormed the charts and thrilled the tabloids. Hadley Freeman hangs out with pop's newest disco sensation, and talks fame, style - and Babybel cheese. Photographed by Josh Olins.
It is a summery Sunday night, and Lady Gaga, Dada (her ex-boyfriend and now her creative director, aka Matthew Williams), assorted entourage members and I are speeding across London to meet Madonna and see her perform. Gaga has just come off stage after supporting Take That at Wembley, and, after her fantastic, if also fantastically OTT, set at Glastonbury the week before — during which she appeared to shoot fire out of her breasts — it is hard to imagine anyone less likely to appeal to the mainstream Take That crowd than Gaga. “It was, like, all 35- to 40-year-old women, and I’m there, like, grabbing my vagina and they’re all, like, what?” she says. This is the sixth time she has said “vagina”, or a word for it, in 12 hours, which is fewer than I’d expected, but more perhaps than her PR would have liked.
But the future is looking good. Aside from the upcoming meeting with Madonna, and aside from Gaga’s recent successes (including “Poker Face”, which spent three weeks at number one in the UK single charts), Dada has just told Gaga that Karl Lagerfeld has asked to meet her. “Oh my God, Karl Lagerfeld! You’re serious?” she squeals, her husky New York monotone rising by several octaves. As chance would have it, Gaga is sporting a Chanel jacket, paired with fishnet tights, a leotard and Chanel ankle boots. (“It’s a very lady look,” she claims.) She leans back in her seat. “I can’t believe I have three hours free now,” she says. “Well, there are a lot of phone interviews I could ask you to do,” her PR interjects, only semi-joking. She mock scowls from beneath her heavy blonde fringe. “Don’t you dare,” she says, then, as if remembering who she is, quickly corrects herself: “0f course I’ll do them.” She leans sleepily against Dada’s arm. “I’ll do anything you want,” she trails off. It has been a long day.
Twelve hours earlier: “Oh my Gaaahhhd, that is so sick, that is fucked up, that is high fashion,” Gaga decrees when looking at herself in the mirror wearing some lacy Mickey Mouse-style ears by Maison Michel. (This is an expression of the highest approval.) It is about 10 am and she has had three hours’ sleep, “at most”, after a late-night gig at GAY. Predictably, though, she has more fizz and vim than anyone else at the Vogue shoot. She never walks, only scurries. “I looooove that,” she cries, dashing to another rail and pulling out a hot-pink tulle skirt, but then pauses. “Wait, I wore hot pink in my last [David] LaChapelle shoot, so we should probably do something different. Oh my God, that jacket is sick!”
At this point, Gaga is wearing the outfit she rolled out of bed into — a one-shoulder leotard, ribbed tights, Chanel boots and a pink and grey poncho-like garment, which may, or may not, be by Giles. “Yoo-hoo, where do you come from?” she halloos to the poncho, after I ask its provenance, and she whips it right off to find out. The poncho does not have a tag— nor does it reply. She is also, of course, in full make-up, replete with blonde wig (soon to be replaced by a softer; wavier version by Sam McKnight — a look she adopts after the shoot), and lashes so thick they act as mini visors. Gaga describes her look as “New York avant-garde fashion monster”, and, when asked who her style icons are, she replies in a snap, “Grace Jones and Jesus — I love loincloths.” She pauses for breath, then announces, to no one in particular, “I want some Babybel cheese!”
In a music year dominated by strong female debuts, Lady Gaga’s has been the most successful, by some distance. Her debut self-penned album, The Fame, bas sold more than 2.3 million copies and it kicked Ronan Keating off the number one spot in the UK album
charts — which is reason enough to love her. She has already been profiled in the New Yorker magazine, which credited her with bringing disco back after the long dominance of R’n’B. The Haus of Gaga — a collective comprising the singer and her artistic friends
— has been, somewhat dubiously, compared to Andy Warhol’s Factor while Gaga bas been compared to Madonna. And the way she has used, shah we say, an eccentric fashion style to carve out an identity has put her in the aesthetic tradition of Gwen Stefani, Björk and, yes, Grace Jones. Gaga, however, describes herself as “just a good little Catholic girl”, and then looks down at her feet, shod in Louboutin ankle boots. “I could really fuck these shoes.”
Joanne Stefani Germanotta, as she was until four years ago, was born in New York in 1986. Although she makes repeated references to her current life in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, she attended the Catholic girls’ school Convent of the Sacred Heart, which was also the alma mater of the Hilton sisters. Gaga was a talented musician and a smart student. “I dressed in this super-sexualised way — miniskirts, hooker boots. But because I got straight As, the teachers couldn’t do anything,” she smirks.
After a year at Tisch School of the Arts, she dropped out to write music and work as a go-go dancer. Her parents, she admits, were not thrilled. She also changed her name to Lady Gaga, in homage to Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga”. It may be opportune to mention at this point that she was taking “a lot” of drugs (“mainly cocaine, some other stuff—yeah, it was pretty bad”), before quitting for “my health and my father”. By now, she was signed as a songwriter to Interscope Records and writing songs for the Pussycat Dolls and Britney Spears, until her own performing potential was spotted. The Fame, her catchy disco paeon to the world of celebrity, came out last year.
Gaga causes a bit of a fuss whenever she comes to London. Last Januar3 the tabloids were delighted when she was photographed making a late-night visit to a fish-and-chip shop wearing a green leotard. In April, she cowed Jonathan Ross with her unflappable self-confidence and willingness to explain the meaning of her lyric, “bluffin’ with my muffin”, when she appeared on bis talk show. “I suddenly feel really old,” bleated Ross.
“Gaga has been relentless in selling herself,” says music critic Alexis Petridis. “If you walk around London in the middle of winter in your panties, it’s indicative of a certain insane drive, which seems to be on a different level to anyone else’s. But it’s not going to work if the songs aren’t there, and she writes really strong pop songs with big, hook-y choruses.”
She also has a 23-year-old’s tendency towards self-contradiction. Despite her often mentioned pride in her education, whenever someone says a vaguely sophisticated word, such as, say, “trajectory”, she and Dada collapse into giggles. “Trajectory!” she hoots. When asked about the comparisons between the Haus of Gaga and Warhol’s Factory, she flinches in irritation: “I wasn’t around then, so I don’t know. I’m just trying to be a real artist, and have real experiences, so I can tell real stories. “Yet she invites such comparisons, not least via the short film she shows before her Wembley gig called Who Shot C’1andy Warhol?, in which she stars as Warhol.
She is also an extremely good model, one who knows how to create a strong image, which comes from a real awareness of how she looks, coupled with a genuine love of fashion. Her features are of the oversized variety that photographs well, and her body is soft and small. Despite her lack of sleep, her big eyes are bright. “Oh, hello, old friend!” she coos, stepping into an Alexander McQueen gown. On the shoot, she poses with the practised art of someone who has gazed at fashion magazines for years. Nicola Formichetti, fashion director of Vogue Hommes Japan, often works with Gaga, and says, "Gaga is not like any other celebrity I've worked with," says Nicola Formichetti of Vogue Hommes Japans. "She would die for fashion."
"At school I dressed in this super-sexualised way - miniskirts, hooker boots," says Gaga. "But because I got straight A’s, the teachers couldn't do anything."
- Article by Hadley Freeman, photography by Josh Olins
United States
December, 2009
Lady Gaga was in a Hansel and Gretel themed shoot and interviewed.
"I've always been an outspoken and extreme dresser," pronounces Lady Gaga, her embodying a Marc Jacobs-clad witch for Annie Leibovitz's Hansel and Gretel portfolio (inspired by Richard Jones's production of the 1893 Engelbert Humperdinck opera, opening this month at the Metropolitan Opera). To prove her point, Lady Gaga arrived at Vogue to discuss the shoot wearing a trailing white chiffon Galliano goddess gown with Philip Treacy headdress that spelled VOGUE in clipped white feathers. The following day, she came to see Creative Director Grace Coddington in a little black dress with a flaming-red wig, and later appeared on location, as Coddington recalls, "stark naked except for her rubber raincoat and some very, very high heels!" She then promptly threw herself in the mud at Leibowitz's feet. "gaga was so bubbly and chatty and enthusiastic and excited to be alive," says Coddington. "She was up for anything."
Gaga acknowledges that her art director, Matthew williams--"my Jean Paul Goude"--was "the inspiration that made the connection for me between the art world and the fashion world. He used to say things like 'If you want to make a shoulder pad, don't research jackets--research sculpture, mineral rocks, paintings.' he thinks in a different way; he is the designer of the future."
Fashion and art collide in Gaga's work, too. "We'd been thinking of innovative ways to premiere the music," she says about her decision to debut "Bad Romance" at Alexander McQueen's Plato's Atlantis show, which she found "not of this world." "When Magdalena was stomping her pretty little hooves down the runway." she says, "it was dreamlike." Meanwhile her ballad "Speechless" ("about my love for my father") was first performed in November in Los Angeles at MOCA's thirtieth-anniversary gala, as part of an installation by Francesco Vezzoli. For this she became, in her words, "a child of the Warhol of my time, among the most famous Pop Artists of our time--Damien Hirst made the piano!"
Lady Gaga's unique and winning blend of art, fashion, and music take to the road with her Monster Ball tour, kicking off November 27.
- Article by Hamish Bowles, photography by Annie Leibovitz
Fall Fashion Preview (July 2010)
OPRAH GOES GAGA
AS COCHAIR OF THE COSTUME INSTITUTE'S BALL CELEBRATING ITS BLOCKBUSTER NEW EXHIBITION, "AMERICAN WOMAN," OPRAH GETS TO KNOW LADY GAGA AND HAS THE TIME OF HER LIFE.
THE DAY BEFORE
Like a proud but concerned mother, Oprah Winfrey is staring intently into Lady Gaga's powdery, pale, if not poker face. With one hand on Gaga's upper arm to steady her, Oprah, gorgeous in a midnight-blue Oscar de la Renta ball dress, carefully brushes several platinum-blonde wig hairs out of Lady Gaga's zombie eyes.
The most-famous-at-this-very-moment pop star in the world, on the cover of Time as we speak, is beyond exhausted. "I am hallucinating," Gaga says as she sips coffee through a straw. She has been up for more than 20 hours straight, shooting her latest video in Los Angeles, after which she boarded a private plane and flew directly to New York City to be photographed with Oprah not to mention perform at the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute gala the next evening for the party that kicks off and celebrates in splendid high style the institute's newest exhibition, "American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity" (through August 15).
These two very particular women one, the quintessential American Woman and cochair of the event; the other, a bizarre and brilliant and peculiarly American pastiche of seemingly every woman and a few men, most obviously Madonna, Cher, and Elton John are posing together for Mario Testino in a cocktail lounge at the Mark Hotel. It's the very same room where, in just 24 hours, Oprah will attend the decadent after-the-Met party, where she will be the one to carry on like a rock star till the wee hours while Gaga finally gets some sleep.
For now, the two are girlishly bonding despite being fussed over, with seven or eight hands in each of their faces. Oprah says to Gaga, "Didn't we have a time when you were on my show? That was a time. We had a moment." Gaga replies, "That was a really special day for me." Suddenly Testino, who has been hunched over a computer looking at the photos, shouts, "In-sane !" Gaga and Oprah scurry over to see...
- Article by Jonathan Van Meter, photography by Mario Testino
The Power Issue (March, 2011)
How appropriate—how accurate!—her name is. It is more of a title, really, one she bestowed upon herself mere moments before she became so insanely famous. The Gaga half makes immediate, intuitive sense, an utterance that sounds like an infant’s first word but is, in fact, French and means, essentially, to be utterly enthralled by something—excited to the point of being touched by madness. (That it describes both the pop star and her uniquely obsessed fans makes it even more perfect.) But it is the Lady part of her name that has gone underexplored.
Put aside for a moment that she often appears in public with no pants on, or that she performs part of her show covered in blood, or that she screams like Sam Kinison onstage, or that she says the F-word with metronomic consistency. In person, she is unfailingly polite and surprisingly dignified. She speaks in the clipped, proper diction that is often mistaken for a Madonna-like pretension but is in fact born of twelve years of attending Convent of the Sacred Heart, the oldest private girls’ school in Manhattan, where Gloria Vanderbilt matriculated, an institution known for turning out self-possessed young ladies who speak perfect French and have the vocabularies of William F. Buckley, Jr. Indeed, what surprises me most during the time I spend embedded with the pop star—inside the giant plastic bubble, so to speak—while she is on tour in London and Paris at the end of December is how effortlessly she switches back and forth between “lady” and “gaga.”
It is a few hours before the start of the Monster Ball, the last of five sold-out shows at London’s O2 arena, and I am sitting in an empty lounge backstage, waiting for Gaga to arrive. The room—the contents of which travel with the tour (28 trucks and fourteen buses; 140 people) from city to city—is outfitted like a VIP area in a nightclub: low black leather sectionals, silver floor lamps, a stocked bar, a huge stereo system, and little black cocktail tables set with bowls of miniature candy bars. She is an hour late. Suddenly the curtains part and Lady Gaga makes her entrance, mincing into the room holding a porcelain teacup and saucer in one hand and a wineglass for me in the other. (Like fainting on command or dropping a glove, the long-lost art of making an entrance, which Gaga seems to have single-handedly revived, is a remarkably effective way to shift the conversation.) “I don’t like the idea of you having to drink wine out of a plastic cup,” she says as she makes her way toward me, one tiny step at a time. She proffers her powdered cheeks for a kiss-kiss as a bottle of Sancerre is opened, which she insists on serving to me herself. “Pouring your own wine is bad luck,” she says.
She is still in her day look: a slinky black-and-white striped dress—a gown, really—with a four-foot train and shoes that—do I even need mention?—make her feet look as if they are screwed on backward. The heels bring her nearly up to my height of six feet. (She is five feet one.) She has a Bride of Frankenstein updo, with a brooch perched on top. Gaga glances down at the bowl of candy on the coffee table in front of us, shoots me a look over the top of her granny glasses, and deadpans, “What, the Mars bars aren’t doing it for you?” I have eaten three of them, I tell her, and she apologizes profusely for making me wait. She then asks an assistant to bring us a proper spread, which arrives moments later and consists of enough filet mignon to feed twelve people.
Lady Gaga may be behaving as if she were a member of Marie Antoinette’s coterie—the powdered wig, the binding costume, the impeccable courtliness—but it’s a far cry from what I witnessed the night before. After catching her performance, I was ushered backstage to her dressing room and found a scene that seemed entirely unhinged. Gaga herself looked like a lunatic: Barefoot, still covered in fake blood, mascara running down her face, she was careening around the room in a robe made of red feathers like a cross between Alice Cooper and Big Bird. There were dancers running in and out, mixing and spilling drinks, and a peanut gallery of strangely bedazzled gay men sitting on the sofas singing “Adelaide’s Lament,” from Guys and Dolls, which Gaga joined in on when she wasn’t bouncing off the walls.
Gaga stumbled up to me to say hello and then introduced me to the guy she was hanging all over: a tall, boyishly cute heavy metal–looking dude with a mullet, wearing a sleeveless black leather vest. “This is Luc,” she said proudly. “He’s my boyfriend.” He looked down at her for a moment, and a knowing grin crossed his face. “OK, Bette Midler,” he said. Moments later I was ushered out of the room by Wendi Morris, Gaga’s road manager—in an effort, it seemed to me, to protect Gaga from herself. As I was walking through the curtains I looked back, and Gaga was in Luc’s lap. “Jonathan, wait,” she whined like a teenage girl in need of attention. “Don’t you want to stay and ask me some questions?” Obvious to everyone but herself: not the time for an interview.
What a difference a day makes. Back in the arena not 24 hours later, she is serene, sober, and sipping tea out of her fancy cup. What did you do today? I ask, and the answer is probably not what her millions of adoring fans would expect. “I stayed in bed all day,” she says. “I do this very strange thing with my foot when I am feeling lonely. I rub my left foot with the right foot. Is that weird?”
No, I tell her. It’s called self-soothing. A lot of people do it.
“OK, then. So I soothed all day.” She pauses for a moment. “In this hair. Because I actually wore this hairpiece out last night and then I fell asleep in it.”
And then you just got up and went about your day?
“Well, no,” she says, batting her eyelashes. “She had to be fluffed up first.”
Gaga can be forgiven for being wiped out. She has been on tour for three years without a real break, and on the road with the Monster Ball since February 2009. “Let’s call a spade a spade here,” she says. “I am really fucking tired. I am at that last mile of the marathon when your fingers and your toes are numb and you can’t feel your body, and I am just going on adrenaline. But in the overarching objective of my life, I am really only at mile two. I try to keep that in mind.”
If you have not seen Lady Gaga live, you do not know from Lady Gaga. In an arena, her music, which has often been dismissed as run-of-the-mill Euro-pop—somehow not edgy or deep enough—takes flight. It is as if each song were written for the express purpose of being belted—roared—in front of 20,000 people on an extravagant stage set with ten dancers taking up the rear. She manages to go from insane, over-the-top rock opera to syncopated dance routine to intimate, boozy piano ballad and then back again, through thirteen costume changes, without ever losing her total command of the stage. The fact that she has a huge voice, plays the piano and the stand-up bass, and wrote every lyric and melody herself adds to the sense that you are in the presence of a true artist who has only just begun to show what she’s made of.
Of course she’s comfortable onstage. She has been playing the piano since she was four and by eleven was performing in big recitals. As she puts it, “I was a strange, loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece.” Still showing no false modesty, Lady Gaga says of herself now, “Speaking purely from a musical standpoint, I think I am a great performer. I am a talented entertainer. I consider myself to have one of the greatest voices in the industry. I consider myself to be one of the greatest songwriters. I wouldn’t say that I am one of the greatest dancers, but I am really quite good at what I do.” Big words from someone who’s only been around for three years. “I think it’s OK to be confident in yourself,” she says.
Her fans couldn’t agree more. They hang on her every word, scream when she screams, and dance throughout the entire two-hour-long extravaganza. At one show, I stood in the wings and watched as at least a dozen women were pulled out of the crush in front of the barricades and taken away on stretchers because they were overcome and near collapse.
It is no secret that Lady Gaga has an especially intense relationship with her fans, whom she refers to as her “little monsters.” She has said more than once, “I see myself in them.” Why is that? “I was this really bad, rebellious misfit of a person—I still am—sneaking out, going to clubs, drugs, alcohol, older men, younger men. You imagine it, I did it. I was just a bad kid. And I look at them, and every show there’s a little more eyeliner, a little more freedom, and a little more ‘I don’t give a fuck about the bullies at my school.’ For some reason, the fans didn’t become more Top 40. They become even more of this cult following. It’s very strange and exciting.”
Unlike the chilly, hyperchoreographed seduction of Madonna, say, or the manufactured pop of Britney or Janet, Lady Gaga’s performance style is raw and emotional. “I am quite literally chest open, exposed, open-heart surgery every night on that stage, bleeding for my fans and my music. It’s so funny when people say, ‘It’s amazing to see how hard you work.’ We’re supposed to work hard! I have the world at my fingertips. I am not going to saunter around the stage doing pelvic thrusts and lip-synching. That’s not at all why I am in this. I don’t feel spiritually connected to anyone in Hollywood makeup and a gown with diamond earrings on. I am just a different breed. I want to be your cool older sister who you feel really connected with, who you feel understands you and refuses to judge anything about you because she’s been there.”
Her relationship with her fans occasionally seems to verge on unhealthy, as if both sides were overly invested in something that in the end is impossible. I bring up a YouTube video that got a lot of attention in late November, in which Gaga is crying in an arena in Poland as she talks to the audience. “Sometimes, being onstage is like having sex with my fans,” she explains. “They’re the only people on the planet who in an instant can make me just lose it.”
When she talks about her fans, one hears shades of messianic zeal. “I want for people in the universe, my fans and otherwise, to essentially use me as an escape,” she says. “I am the jester to the kingdom. I am the route out. I am the excuse to explore your identity. To be exactly who you are and to feel unafraid. To not judge yourself, to not hate yourself. Because, as funny as it is that I am on the cover of Vogue—and no one is laughing harder than I am—I was the girl in school who was most likely to walk down the hallway and get called a slut or a bitch or ugly or big nose or nerd or dyke. ‘Why are you in the chorus?’ ” (She’s more Glee than Gary Glitter in some ways.)
For Gaga, the stakes are high. “Because as an artist and as a performer, the person that they look up to to create this space of freedom and escapism, I want to give my fans nothing less than the greatest album of the decade. I don’t want to give them something trendy. I want to give them the future.”
Not everyone gets Gaga, of course, and no one is more aware of that fact than the singer herself. As she puts it, “What I do for a living is not a cheese sandwich. It’s not like, either good or bad. It’s much more complicated than that.”
What no one can deny is her uncanny ability to mine decades of avant-garde and pop-culture history and twine them together in a way that feels like the future. She is a human synthesizer, a style aggregator, the perfect Wiki-Google- YouTube–era pop star. Elton John calls her “the most adventurous and talented star of our age.”
Gaga herself is very open about her influences. “It’s not a secret that I have been inspired by tons of people,” she says, “David Bowie and Prince being the most paramount in terms of live performance.” She also seems to have made peace with the fact that she is compared to—or, less charitably, accused of ripping off—nearly every artist of the last 50 years. “I could go on and on about all of the people I have been compared to—from Madonna to Grace Jones to Debbie Harry to Elton John to Marilyn Manson to Yoko Ono—but at a certain point you have to realize that what they are saying is that I am cut from the cloth of performer, that I am like all of those people in spirit.” She takes a bite of filet mignon and says with her mouth full, “She was born this way.”
Lady Gaga’s new album, Born This Way, does not come out until May, but the first single, of the same name, is, by the time you are reading this, no doubt blaring from the radio. I first hear the song when Gaga, iPod in hand, gets up from the sectional where we have been sitting, walks over to the stereo, plugs it in, and then looks at me and says, “Are you ready? I don’t think you’re ready.” She turns it up to eleven. The song at first sounds suspiciously like a Madonna tune and then switches into something that feels a bit like a Bronski Beat hit and then finally transforms into its own thing: a Gaga original. Clearly an homage to the obscure underground disco record “I Was Born This Way”; it is an unbelievably great dance song, destined to be the anthem of every gay-pride event for the next 100 years.
She tells me that Elton John pronounced it the “gayest song” he had ever heard. “I wrote it in ten fucking minutes,” she says, “and it is a completely magical message song. And after I wrote it, the gates just opened, and the songs kept coming. It was like an immaculate conception.” She plays a few more songs and mentions a few others—with tantalizing titles like “Hair,” “Bad Kids,” and “Government Hooker.”
The second single to be released is called “Judas” and is, typically, a mash-up: The melody sounds like it was written for the Ronettes, but it is set to a sledgehammering dance beat and is about falling in love with backstabbing men of the biblical variety. Another song, “Americano,” which she describes as like “a big mariachi techno-house record, where I am singing about immigration law and gay marriage and all sorts of things that have to do with disenfranchised communities in America,” has a resounding Piafesque chorus. Turns out it was intentional. “It sounds like a pop record, but when I sing it, I see Edith Piaf in a spotlight with an old microphone.” (Piaf is an apt reference—they both evince a similar brand of heroic vulnerability.) But, she says, “there are some very rock-’n’-roll moments on the album, too: There’s a Bruce Springsteen vibe, there’s a Guns N’ Roses moment. It’s the anthemic nature of the melodies and the choruses.” She feels it’s different from—and better than—anything she’s done before. “It is much more vocally up to par with what I’ve always been capable of. It’s more electronic, but I have married a very theatrical vocal to it. It’s like a giant musical-opus theater piece.”
Troy Carter, Lady Gaga’s manager, tells me that she recorded the entire album—all seventeen songs—on the road over the last year and a half, “which is not the ideal situation for most artists,” he says. “But for her it was great because she was able to tap into the emotions inside of those arenas. We would have a conversation backstage about something, and the next day she’d play me a song relating to the conversation that we just had! Watching the creative process with her is incredible.”
Carter’s partner, Vincent Herbert, whom Gaga credits with discovering her in 2007 on Myspace, has worked as a producer with Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder. “She made songs that are going to touch people,” he says. “The song ‘Born This Way’ just takes your breath away. It’s like everybody from three to 103 can relate to that song. I think she made the Thriller of the twenty-first century.”
Gaga’s musical tastes are all over the map, which partly explains why she feels so comfortable in London. “Yes,” she says, “I have a very broad taste in music, and the English don’t differentiate the rock star from the pop star. It’s all the same thing.” But there is more to it. American music critics, for example, insist on defining her with dizzying numbers of pop-music references, but the fashion world sees something more precise: the influence of a very specific tribe of English eccentrics—Leigh Bowery, Isabella Blow, et al. “The fashion community in general got me much earlier than everyone else,” she says. “But actually, I felt truly embraced by this London cultural movement, that McQueen, Isabella, Daphne Guinness wing of the English crowd. I remember when I first started doing photo shoots, people would say, ‘My God, you look so much like Isabella Blow, it scares me.’ And McQueen used to say, ‘Oh, my God, your boobs!’ He actually grabbed both of them and said, ‘Even your boobs are like hers!’ ”
Like those style icons, Gaga demonstrates a commitment to outrageous self-presentation that makes every crazy costume worn by Elton or Cher or Madonna look like child’s play. (As Karl Lagerfeld once told me, “I hate average, and she is anything but average.”) But her determination to outdo them all, and herself, cuts both ways: She has been venerated and vilified for her fashion stunts. Some of her looks have been truly inspired (the red latex Elizabethan gown with sparkly red hearts covering her eyes to meet the queen), delightfully startling (the lace dress that crawled right across her face), downright silly (the Kermit cape), or simply mystifying (the meat dress). She clearly wants and expects a reaction. When she talks about her makeup for the “Born This Way” video, she says, “The whole world is going to hate it in the best kind of way.”
Picked up for a M.A.C. Cosmetics campaign early on in her career, Gaga has always worked both within and outside the fashion establishment, collaborating on the one hand with designers like Lagerfeld and Armani and Prada, and on the other with artists like Terence Koh and unknown up-and-comers. “I pay for a lot of fashion myself because I want to support young designers,” she says. All of her looks are filtered through the stylist Nicola Formichetti, who, along with the rest of her creative team, makes up the Haus of Gaga. Because Formichetti, who was recently appointed the creative director of Thierry Mugler, is in the midst of planning his first show for the house, I ask Gaga about it. “Our relationship does have some influence on the show, but I don’t want to take any credit for it. Nicola is fashion. He’s the most remarkable man.”
At the end of the day, the way she dresses is part of the entire performance-art aspect of her life. “It’s not about a choice,” she says. “It’s about a lifestyle that I live and breathe.” Does she sometimes feel misunderstood? At first she says no but then retracts it. “Well, yes, actually,” she says. “There is this assumption that women in music and pop culture are supposed to act a certain way, and because I’m just sort of middle fingers up, a-blazing, doing what my artistic vision tells me to do, that is what is misunderstood. People are like, ‘She dresses this way for attention.’ Or like, ‘Ugh, the meat dress.’ ” She rolls her eyes. “People just want to figure it out or explain it. The truth is, the mystery and the magic is my art. That is what I am good at. You are fascinated with precisely the thing that you are trying to analyze and undo.”
I am sitting in a vast suite in a very swank hotel in Place Vendôme in Paris, once again waiting for Gaga to make an entrance. Her road manager, Wendi Morris, is pacing around talking on her cell phone to Troy Carter. “I am not going to ask her that,” she says. “Not now.” Pause. “If you pay to have my head reattached to my body, I will ask her.” She laughs. It should not come as a surprise to anyone that Gaga is not always delightful. She is at the center of a complex multimillion-dollar enterprise that does not run smoothly at all times. Indeed, as an epic snowstorm was shutting down half of Europe, Gaga and her trucks and buses were trying to make their way to Paris. When the caravan got through the Channel Tunnel, the drivers were told that they would have to idle at a way station until the roads were passable. A couple of them decided to shove right on through anyway and were promptly pulled over, the drivers arrested. The quest to free the drivers—and, more important, the Monster Ball equipment they were ferrying—in time for the show to go on on Sunday night went all the way up to President Sarkozy. The answer came back: No. The Monster Ball would have to be canceled. Gaga, Morris tells me, was livid.
The door to the suite opens, and Gaga appears in a long-sleeved, high-neck nude-verging-on-lavender dress with a train, and a décolletage encrusted with what she describes as “pinky-pearly scales.” There is a diamond-shaped cutout at the cleavage, and her breasts—nipples covered with strips of white tape—occasionally make a surprise appearance. “You don’t even want to know what happened yesterday,” she says. “The wrath. It wasn’t cute. It’s not something I would want anyone to see.”
She seems a little on edge still, a bit cranky. “This is boring,” she says. “Let’s go get something to eat.” The security team is activated; the car is brought around. “I want to go out the front door,” she says to her security guys. “Say hello to the fans.” Are you sure? one of them asks. “Yeah, because they have been waiting. I think it’s good for them to know that I care.” She holds out her hand, which is nearly covered by a serpentine diamond ring. “I am going through an Elizabeth Taylor moment. Don’t judge me. They are all certified non-conflict diamonds.”
We head through the lobby, and I can see a barely contained mob of fans through the windows. “Awwww, see?” she says, as she approaches the entrance. “How could you go out the back when you have that waiting out front?” The doors swing open, and Gaga, surrounded by security, plunges in. “Gaga! Gaga! Gaga!” A teenage boy pushes to the front. “I am from Milano! Please! Please! Please!” They are all holding out a scrap of something to be signed or angling to get a picture. The crowd surges forward. A security guy yells, “One at a time! Take it easy!” There are girls with tears streaming down their faces. I almost get knocked over. Morris pulls me out of the maw and shoves me into the van, and the doors close behind us. But the fans do not give up. They are banging on the windows, pressing their faces against the glass. “They are so sweet,” Gaga says. Not exactly the word I would have chosen.
We pull away from the mob and head down the street, about a dozen paparazzi on motorcycles trailing close behind. “I don’t know if you knew this,” she says, “but the other night, in London, I had food poisoning. I was vomiting backstage during the changes.” I had no idea, I say. “Nobody knew,” she says. “I just Jedi mind-tricked my body. You will not vomit onstage. Because I was also thinking, If I do, they are going to think I’m drunk. And I don’t want them to think I am human, let alone drunk. I certainly wouldn’t want them to think I had something so ordinary as food poisoning.” She laughs.
We make our way to Chez André, and Gaga orders, in perfect French, escargot, steak tartare, and chicken. She likes her protein, this pop star. Moments earlier, when we walked into the restaurant, every person in the room stopped talking and stared, forks suspended in midair. Now, seated in a corner by the window, with a curtain that comes up right to the top of her beehive, I can see people outside on the street jumping up and down, trying to catch a glimpse. Let’s not forget that her first album is titled The Fame and the second The Fame Monster. “There is the fame monster, as you can see,” she says, gesturing outside, “but it also comes from within. It will only change you and affect you if you allow it to. You have to reject all the evils of it and try to turn all the positive things that you can use about fame into great things. Like Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Gaga used her visibility, her unusual connection with her fans, and her social-media prowess to agitate for the repeal of the law, tweeting senators, making protest videos, and speaking at rallies. “That’s me turning my fame into something that is positive and makes me feel good about my life.”
I wonder out loud how her parents, Joe and Cynthia Germanotta, have handled all of this. “It was hard in the beginning, but we have wrestled fame to the ground together,” she says. Gaga’s father, who was very involved in her career early on, had heart surgery a few years ago. “I obsess about his health,” she says. “I’m very Italian. I call him every day. I ask my mother if he’s been smoking. They are in their 50s, and they still live in the same apartment on the Upper West Side. Nothing has changed since I have become a star. I am a real family girl. When it comes to love and loyalty, I am very old-fashioned. And I am quite down-to-earth for such an eccentric person.”
One of the most peculiar things about Gaga is that for all the ways she’s transformed the pop landscape, she herself romanticizes her early days as aspiring musician Stefani Germanotta: “It was grassroots, downtown New York, blood, sweat, and tears, dancing, music, whiskey, pummeling the streets, playing every venue I could get my hands on. It was the hustle and the grind and the traffic of New York that propelled me to where I am today. I don’t in any way associate my past with anything other than the hunger and the starvation for success that I still feel. It was the most beautiful time in my life. And funnily enough, I still live in the same apartment, hang out with the same friends, drink at the same bars, and I dance in the same studios with the same dancers. Really, nothing has changed.” (Is it a coincidence that astronomically successful 20-somethings Gaga and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have rejected much of the flash and bling of the boom years, live in relatively modest accommodations, and are very close to their families—or is there a new paradigm for dominators of the Zeitgeist?)
There are an awful lot of people trying to get in on Gaga’s creation myth. A mean-spirited book came out in September; an ex-lover and songwriting partner filed a $30 million lawsuit against her (later dismissed); and every bartender she ever kissed on the Lower East Side has a story. When I ask her about her life before she was discovered and signed to Interscope Records, she says, “My ride through the industry was an interesting one because people loved me but there was a very big raised eyebrow about me. I mean, a big one. So people were kind of like, well, I’m involved but not really. And as soon as I took off, it was like, I invented her, I made her, I wrote the music. When, in reality, I am completely self-invented.”
We finish lunch and head back through the scrum of paparazzi and into the car for the drive to the arena. She has a show tonight and another tomorrow, the makeup show for the cancellation the night before. Despite the fact that it is just two nights before Christmas Eve, she cannot bear to leave Paris without giving her fans what they have waited so long for. Her cell phone rings. “Hi, Mom! . . . Well, I’m, you know, I’m tired, Mommy. . . . Luc’s just kind of being a baby. . . . Were you able to find his earring? . . . OK, thanks, Mommy. . . . No, I’m OK. . . . I love you. . . . All right. . . . I love you.” She hangs up and falls silent. I check my BlackBerry, and when I look up, she is sound asleep. A few miles later, her eyes open, and I tease her. “My friends tell me that I recharge like a robot,” she says. “Jimmy Iovine, the chairman of Interscope, actually laughs at me: Whenever I have ridden on a plane with him I have fallen asleep, and apparently I don’t move. I sit in my clothes, perfectly still, head straight up, and I just sleep. And then I open my eyes and he’s like, ‘You scare me the way you sleep.’ ”
It’s so perfect, I say, for someone who likes to be. . . .
“Poised? As much as possible?”
Back in New York a week later, I call Iovine, and when he gets on the phone he just starts laughing. “Isn’t she amazing?” he says. “Did she take you for a ride? Isn’t that a great train to be on, being on tour with her?” And then he says this: “Artists like her are very rare. Artists that have that many facets of their career in line and can do that many things. She can write like Carole King, produce, sing like that, work-work-work like that. She gets her point of view across; she has the fashion, the performance—the entire vision. It’s very, very rare.” What does the future hold for Lady Gaga? “Only she can imagine it,” he says. “I don’t have that good of an imagination like she does. But she’s the real thing. She will go as long as she wants to or physically can. Her talent will take her as far as she wants to take it. Most artists of this caliber, if they can stay healthy, there’s no limitation. None.”
- Photography by Mario Testino
Special Anniversary Issue (September, 2011)
Whether Lady Gaga, appearing on our cover for the second time, is touring the globe with a groundbreaking extravaganza world tour or launching the most innovative perfume in two decades, she does it entirely on her own terms. As in: She said yes to Coty’s request on the condition that the company not only conjure scent notes to her specification but figure out how to create a liquid that appears black in the bottle, but when sprayed, becomes clear. (After all, she points out, “The fragrance is called Fame. It must be black. It must be enticing. You must want to lick and touch and feel it, but the look of it must terrify you.”) Also on her own terms: the Born This Way Ball, her massive spectacle, which has just made its way through Asia and Australia and is destined next for Europe and the States. She banned video screens, instead dreaming up a “fortress” that lets her dance 50 feet above an audience of 30,000. "I really wanted to break the mold of what modern touring is now,” Gaga explains.
This is Lady Gaga, after all, who manages to be both utterly out of this world and yet, strangely, simultaneously down-to-earth, as Jonathan Van Meter’s profile reveals. The 26-year-old star is as apt to head out on the town in Versace or McQueen as she is wearing an anonymous mystery gift left on her hotel doorstep with no note and no name—a dress made of hundreds of miniature mirrors sewn into origami-like boxes. In Gaga’s world, where borders blur (fantasy and reality, scary and cute), what was once risk-taking (the meat dress) becomes oddly charming (the reinvention of the meat dress is one of the highlights of the Born This Way Ball). “We were talking about putting the show together,” she recounts, “and I said, OK, what if I was someone’s grandma and I was going to a concert tonight. How would I know that it was a Gaga show? And we all just sort of looked at each other and said,‘The meat dress.’ ” That’s Mother Monster, mindful of the grandmas and the Goths alike, and regardless how large her fan base has swelled (the Queen of Twitter counts more than 28 million followers), she knows many of them by name. “I don’t really make records for people to listen to and go, ‘Wow, she’s a genius,’ ” says Gaga. “I’d really like you to order a drink, maybe kiss the person you came with that evening, or rediscover something about your past that makes you feel even more brave.”
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- Photography by Mert and Marcus
China
June, 2012
- Photography by Mario Testino