Dressed in a hot-pink, Swarovski-studded Versace cocktail dress, Lady GaGa is throwing some shapes in the mirror. She has won the battle of the lip gloss (her mouth is a deep red stain, as opposed to the pink preferred by the stylist, which was deemed, in her flat Manhattan drawl, “too Barbie, too pop. I mean, I love pop, but . . .” A neon-orange shade is also rejected as “too 1980s”, while the cabernet red, everybody agrees, is very “chic”). Now the in-yer-face, 22-year-old pop sensation is ready for her close-up.
Having already stormed both the charts and the tabloids this year in her assault on the UK music scene, Lady GaGa has been throwing her fluoro-tanned weight around all afternoon, arguing the toss over every tweak of her hair and make-up. Nobody seems to mind — in fact, it’s quite refreshing to meet a pop star who says things like, “In this time of recession, people love this hair — it’s so nostalgic!” when demanding a James Dean quiff; or, deadpanning, “I don’t get body anxiety — I don’t eat,” as she prances naked around the studio.
Even if you don’t know her current hits — Just Dance and Poker Face (which are, like, beyond catchy) — you know her look. She’s been papped in every airport, nightspot and studio imaginable this year in her trademark panties, vintage shades, shoulder pads and bullet-proof blonde bangs (dyed because, as a brunette, she kept being mistaken for Any Winehouse). You can imagine a million mini GaGas all over clubland come summer.
GaGa’s PA and former room-mate of four years, Jennifer, is surveying the scene closely. According to her, we are looking at “the next Madonna — I’m telling you. The determination, that knowledge of who you are, what you want and what the people want. That’s her”.
Born and raised in New York by an internet entrepreneur and his business-partner wife, Lady GaGa (real name Stefani Joanne Germanotta) had been hustling gigs on the underground club scene for three years before she finally won a place, aged 17, at the city’s esteemed Tisch School of the Arts. By her 20th birthday, she’d scored a record deal and was writing songs for Britney Spears and the Pussycat Dolls — two years later and her second single has reached No 1 in six countries. Now, fresh from her performance at the Brits with Pet Shop Boys, she is about to embark on her own headline tour.
The Lady GaGa show is compelling. A warm, charming, intelligent chatterbox, she is also a ridiculous show-off. There’s a story about the time that little girl GaGa greeted a new babysitter completely starkers, and it’s a trick she’s still pulling now, stripping off to change outfits as if it’s a dance routine. Her body is petite, soft and womanly, without a scrap of cellulite, and the tan so luminous that I have to ask where she gets it done. “In London, I see James at St Tropez,” she says, adding with a flutter of her 3in false lashes, “and yes, he’s seen my vagina.”
She writes and performs her own songs and claims to have “an artistic intuition about what’s coming next”, so the Madonna comparison is obviously one she gets a lot. “I guess there are a couple of things we innately have in common,” she drawls. “We’re both Italian-American women, we both started out in the New York underground scene — and we both became famous when we dyed our hair blonde.” But seriously, because this is one lady who takes her art very seriously, “I think what Madonna and I share is that we’re both fearless, we both have a lot of nerve”. Her influences range from Warhol to Bowie to Versace. “I appreciate any fashion label that is emblematic of a lifestyle. When I see Versace ads, it’s a whole way of living. Karl Lagerfeld? Brilliant.”
Arriving at the studio today in vintage Chanel worn with “future Fifties” hair and a bra, she describes her style as “a commentary on what it means to be a lady”. Her love of fashion came from her mother, who was “always very well kept and beautiful. She wore Ferragamo, Valentino, Paloma Picasso. Her taste is absolutely classic Italian”.
School did little to discourage her — she went to the Convent of the Sacred Heart School, in Manhattan, the same high school as Nicky and Paris Hilton, where the prom was “like a Ralph Lauren runway. There were some quite privileged young ladies in attendance”. It’s unlikely that GaGa was the prettiest or the most popular girl in class. Her oversized features suggest something of an ugly duckling transformation, while her intelligence would have alienated the likes of the Hiltons. Cue the “artsy, musical-theatre, nerdy girl who got good grades”, who learnt the tricks of self-reinvention, and a look that veered between “a bit too sexy and a bit strange. My girlfriends used to tell me that no matter what I was wearing, even zipped up to my neck in a parka, I looked naked”.
For somebody with such a liberal use of the sexual lexicon (she talks about celebrities “masturbating” by changing their image all the time, and describes performing as “like an orgasm”), GaGa is resolutely tight-lipped when it comes to the subject of boys. When quizzed about the men in her life (she was recently photographed out on the town with Mark Ronson, but insists he is just a “dear friend”), she allows a long pause before eventually flipping the question: “Who would you pair me with?”
It’s not as if she has anything to hide (she lets it all hang out in every other area), but GaGa won’t trade in tabloid fodder. I ask about her supposed feud with Christina Aguilera, and she simply states how much she admires Christina as an artist. What she will tell me is that her ex, Dada (together, were they DaGa?), is now one of her chief collaborators in the Haus of GaGa, the hand-picked creative team, including friends from art school, behind her costumes, stage sets and performances. “Dada is quite brilliant and we were crazy lovers, but I stopped it when we discovered what a strong creative connection we had. I didn’t want it just to be about careless love.”
She has said before that she has “decided to marry my art”, and the animal sounds emitted when GaGa sees the results of today’s shoot (“Oh my G-AAA-d!”) suggest that her work gives her all the satisfaction she needs. But when she later jokes that she will “die alone, surrounded by all my stage props and sketches”, there’s an edge to her voice. Perhaps, as Madonna would no doubt testify, this is the price you pay for superstardom.
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