In a year when retailing flat-lined, when a flailing economy sent creative types scurrying for aesthetic foxholes, when the most indelible fashion image was of a dead man’s sequin glove, a single unlikely figure raised the flag for style and its power to confound, bewitch and amuse.
That person is a 23-year-old New Yorker of outsized ambition and middling talents, a onetime Catholic school girl with a Duchampian show-business handle, a self-promoter so tireless she made Paris Hilton look like a lay-about; a woman so assured of her superlatively good bad taste that she wore a fetish-wear gown to meet the Queen of England.
That person, of course, is Lady Gaga.
If 2009 produced little in the way of enduring style phenomena, it did give us Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, a musician whose hooky dance tunes would barely rate a second playing on karaoke night, yet who made it all but impossible to avert one’s gaze from her ongoing spectacle.
Whether clad in a dress of plastic spheres, a monstrous Dutch Boy wig with full S&M leathers; bodysuits and stilettos and a cage that caused her to resemble a walking armillary, Lady Gaga made better use of modern media than almost anybody except the current leader of the free world.
Like Barack Obama, with whom she shares no connection beyond an epic Q rating, Lady Gaga billboards her inspirations. Unlike those of the president, her idols are not Beltway policy geeks or Nobel laureates, but gloriously marginal types and representatives of the cultural dregs. For inspiration, she cites the performance artists Leigh Bowery and Klaus Nomi, and the singer Grace Jones in the intensely stylized period when her image was being masterminded by the brilliant artist-Svengali Jean Paul Goude. She names David Bowie, too, or anyway the David Bowie of Ziggy Stardust vintage, which was about the last time he gave his audiences anything worthwhile to look at.
Lady Gaga makes no bones about assimilating the lessons of celebrities who built careers by tapping into the talents of other and even larger talents (Madonna leaps to mind). But her singular innovation on the sincerest form of flattery has been to barge right past imitation to outright larceny.
Lady Gaga mashes up. She patches together what she finds in the cultural image bank. She takes her own rather nondescript (but pretty) person and subjects herself to a real-time version of Photoshop, studiously and at times laboriously conjuring up an over-the-top creation built from bits of Bowery and Nomi and Jones and Bowie, but also Liberace, Joey Arias and Kylie Minogue.
Although Andy Warhol died just a year after Stefani Germanotta came into the world, and decades before Lady Gaga was willed into being, he was correct as usual in forecasting a time when there would be “new categories of people” being “put up there” as stars. Those people, he wrote in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), would be made up of parts. And their fans, freed from the obligation to idolize a “whole person,” could choose which dimension of a star they wanted to love. Lady Gaga is rigged for that stardom: her persona is an amalgam of surfaces, faceted though not truly 3-D, addictive in the way video games are.
Like an emissary from a parallel world familiar to Second Life types, she is a real-life avatar.
And it is probably for that reason that designers have been so hypnotized by her image. Weary perhaps of the drudgery involved in producing actual clothing, designers were attracted to a star who thinks little of going about in outfits that hobble the body or masks that make it impossible to see.
Lady Gaga “lives for” fashion, she has said. She imagines the clothes she will wear to perform her songs in as she is writing them. She employs a team of stylists known as the Haus of Gaga. She has transformed herself into a cartoon muse who has inspired no less than Marc Jacobs and Alexander McQueen.
Those dandelion Afro wigs at Jacobs’ spring 2010 show for Louis Vuitton seemed to owe an aesthetic debt to Lady Gaga, with a scale so absurd that a viewer forgot about race, and also forgot that the models had faces or were even human in any significant way. Likewise the beast boots and Star Trek eyes and horned coiffures at McQueen’s spring 2010 show, which forced the boundaries between fashion and morphology, as Lady Gaga does routinely, suggesting experiments that even the most extreme surgery addicts have yet to undergo.
More than an ordinary pop star or fashion muse, Lady Gaga seems closer to a gamer’s creation. Her synth-pop music, with its hiccup hooks, help explain why she is rated No. 3 in Billboard’s annual recap of Top Artists of the year, and why she was also termed the top new artist on that same list, and why her name is among those most often searched on the Web. But the voice without the package would equal a novelty act in a Singapore hotel lounge.
That she is the whole package is what made Lady Gaga so hard to ignore this year. And lest anyone fail to see that the package is the message, she makes it a point to go out now and then with her hair styled in a gigantic blond bow.
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From a Brooklyn studio that looks like a cross between a ransacked Toys R Us and a serial killer’s lair, the artist David Henry Nobody Jr is planning the first survey of his career. Held by a headless dummy strung by its heels from the ceiling are a set of photographs from the turn of the century of a then 30-year-old Nobody with the former president of the US. The snapshots are all signed by Donald Trump in gold pen (Nobody supplied the pen). They will be a central piece of the New York artist’s upcoming survey in New York. This
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