Cover story by Caroline Gault
I’m more than nervous when Lady Gaga enters the dressing room at Rexall Place, and her calm, husky voice greets us with genuine excitement. She doesn’t consider herself an intimidating person, but the pop star’s self-assurance is terrifying as hell.
In skin-tight leggings and dark sunglasses, the 22 year-old New York native throws her feet, adorned in three-inch black ankle boots, onto a countertop. While patiently waiting for the taming of her white-blonde Rapunzel locks, helmet-cut bangs, and makeup she calls “glam,” Lady Gaga chats freely with Parlour about her fabulous world of art, sex, and fashion.
I snap out of my star-struck stupor and discover that for Gaga, art comes in many forms. Be it her debut pop album, The Fame, her fashion, stage performance, or Transmission-Gaga-Vision webisodes, she’s speaking to us on a level we haven’t heard since the androgynous era of David Bowie and the avant-garde days of Andy Warhol. She looks through Warhol- esque round specs to prove her manifesto: “[Andy Warhol] would say ‘this is what’s great,’ and if he said it enough, people started to listen.”
“That’s what The Fame is. My album and my music and the attitude that I sing about, is all about being somebody that wears their passion on their sleeve. And, you know, I’ve been tricking people for a long time into thinking that I’m someone that I’m not because of the way I dress – because I make my own clothes . . . It’s that walking art piece idea.”
Gaga’s outrageous fashion is shocking, delighting, and “all about the shape.” This is abundantly clear at her Edmonton performance, where she dances in fluid-robotic movements, wearing a “cocaine inspired dress that’s all about the rock crystal.” Her trademark pairing of fishnets, hoods, and shoulder pads is inspired by the ambiguous and theatrical, the graphic and the dimensional, the glam-superhero and the infamous discotheque at Studio 54. Although she won’t deny her love for Karl Lagerfeld and Maison Martin Margiela (“That’s just me being a fashion snob,” she says), she revels in the unveiling of underground designers.
“I find that my strengths are in discovering new talent . . . I want to work with creative [designers and] magazines – like you guys; creative, innovative, and forward thinking. It’s not just about being sponsored by a huge name.”
But there was a time when the reception to Lady Gaga’s unconventional style was largely negative: “I mean now my outfits are considered cool. Now every time I’ve got an outfit on someone says, ‘You have amazing fashion!’ But there was a time where I was hanging out on Rivington Street and people were like, ‘You’re a fucking freak!’”
I suggest that such hostile reactions are because North American paparazzi-magazine fashion is just a little too safe, and Gaga reacts tenaciously: “It’s not just safe – it’s lack of vision. It’s totally uninspired. When I go to London, I want to lick the street, and try to understand. . . because in London people are in full high fashion walking to work. I mean, people look twice at me in London, but not as much . . . It’s the same way that I can wear [an] outfit in Germany and I’m on the Best Dressed list in a fashion magazine, and then I wear the same outfit in America and I’m on the Worst Dressed list.”
Despite the impression that Gaga was born looking like a rock star, she assures us she wouldn’t be able to materialize her artistic cravings without the help of her creative team, The Haus of Gaga. This talented group of people, who help to choreograph her performances, design her stage-wear, and search for new technology (without making her look like “Inspector Gaga Gadget,” she says), have channeled her Warhol influences with little encouragement.
“It’s really funny, because I always sort of imagined how I’d love my creative team to be, and it’s kind of like that 70’s Factory feel, [where] everyone’s fucking … and I always wanted that. And then I didn’t even have to try. It was like, ‘Oh look – people are pregnant, we’re wearing amazing fashion, there’s debauchery, fights, black eyes, it’s toured, and it’s fabulous.’ I’m very happy.”
When I ask Gaga about the kind of sexual message she’s sending out, she says, “Well, I think that the disco stick is a pretty obvious metaphor. But it’s really just like sexual freedom and a woman being able to exist as a man in that kind of thought and intellectual space. But at the same time it’s difficult to talk about in a way like we are right now, because I also have such strong views about safe sex and STDs . . . But in the music? Yes. I sing about sex. And yes, it’s very over-the-top and kind of raunchy – even lewd. But I’m not really dressed in the same kind of sexual way that you see other female pop stars. There’s like an androgyny and a theatre and a concept to it.”
Up to this point in our interview, I’ve successfully controlled my jittery behavior, but when an important phone call interrupts, I shamelessly eavesdrop and share in Gaga’s ecstatic revelation to the Parlour gang that she’s just booked the Ellen DeGeneres Show.
“Oh my God! I can’t even breathe!” She says. Neither can I, I think, which is overly enthusiastic, misplaced excitement, because I have nothing to do with her world-wide success. Nevertheless, the experience of meeting someone who touches their desires and maintains confidence in their presentation – with a total disregard for the possibility of provoking mass criticism – is inexplicably unique and rewarding.
Moreover, Lady Gaga’s vision for the future proves we haven’t got just another ditsy, over-marketed tabloid-celeb on our hands, we’ve got a generational icon: “When I talk about the future, I don’t mean outer-space. So much of what I’m doing is about pollution, it’s advanced technology, it’s industrial and it’s factory life. It’s not like Mars.”
Over an hour later, after pampering has completed the Gaga transformation, she silences us at the photo shoot with an extravagant, colourful bodysuit, a gold-studded Haus of Gaga jacket, and a bow of hair on top of her head. Lady Gaga poses with spunk, extremity, and variety, allowing little room for direction because, well, we’re watching avant-garde art at its best.
I reflect on a statement she made earlier: “You know, God didn’t make me good at everything. I suck at love, I’m not great at math – I’m like pretty good at math, but I’m not great.” And I think, Okay, so you’re not good at love and math. But you’re taking risks, blurring the concept of gender and changing the face of pop culture! I think I speak for the rest of the Parlour crew when I say we’ll take Gaga just the way she is.