Lady Gaga

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Photograph by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott. Published in Vogue, September 2012.

Lady Gaga set the tone early in her career when she declared her grand ambitions to anyone and everyone who would listen: “I want to be the biggest pop star in the world,”^[1] she told the producer Vincent Herbert, who signed her to Streamline Records. Her future manager, Troy Carter, remembers his first meeting with her like this: “She walked into my office in 2007 wearing fishnet stockings, a leotard, big black sunglasses, and confidence. Too much confidence. She walked in as a superstar.”^[2] Over the next four years Gaga would have three platinum albums and eleven top-ten singles—including a trio of number one hits—and few would doubt that she had achieved her incredible goal.

Lady Gaga’s destiny was apparent from early childhood. As she told Vogue’s Jonathan Van Meter in 2011, “I was a strange, loud little kid who could sit at the piano and kill a Beethoven piece.”^[3] That she grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side would play a central role in Gaga’s growth as an artist—the make-it-there-make-it-anywhere spirit of the city fanning the flames of her ambition. To get her start on the road to stardom she only had to ride the subway train south: “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.”^[4]

The grimy clubs and unconventional population of the Lower East Side also clearly influenced her subsequent fashion choices, which have tended toward the radical and the ultra-artsy. As Vogue’s editor in chief Anna Wintour wrote in the May 2011 issue, Gaga’s style is truly boundary-pushing. Along with her longtime stylist, Nicola Formichetti, Lady Gaga dreams up outrageous—and sometimes shocking—outfits, like the “meat dress” she wore to the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards. Made of pieces of raw flank steak stitched together, it was an immediate conversation piece that drew the ire of PETA and other animal-rights groups; it was also later named Time magazine’s top fashion statement of 2010 and became part of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 2011 exhibit “Women Who Rock: Vision, Passion, Power.”

It’s in this tradition of clothing as performance art as provocation as declaration of independence—the outré territory blazed by New York underground artists like Candy Darling and Leigh Bowery, as well as a legion of wildy accoutred club kids during the 1980s—that won the heart of the fashion world. As Van Meter reported in 2011, “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.”^[5] Whether in a rocker-chick Hussein Chalayan black leather jacket or a Jan Taminiau dress that seems revived from the Gothic recesses of Victorian England, Lady Gaga remains an astonishing individual. As the designer Karl Lagerfeld succinctly declared: “I hate average, and she is anything but average.”^[6]

HISTORY

Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta born in New York City, to Cynthia and Joseph Germanotta, a telecommunications executive and an Internet entrepreneur.

Enrolls in Convent of the Sacred Heart, an all-girls Catholic school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where she develops a taste for the spotlight. “Most of the time I would stay up all night, straightening my hair,” she later says, “and I would even put my makeup on before bed sometimes, so that when I woke up in the morning it would be ready for school. I just liked to be glamorous. It made me feel like a star.”^[7] Active in the school’s musical-theater program, she will have roles in Guys and Dolls and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

Enrolls in New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts at seventeen. She will drop out in her sophomore year to devote herself to her quest for musical stardom, feeling that, “once you learn how to think about art, you can teach yourself.”^[8]

Creates the rock group SGBand (Stefani Germanotta Band) with former NYU classmates, performing on the Lower East Side club circuit.

Releases her first major solo studio album, The Fame, spawning hit singles “Just Dance,” “Poker Face,” and “Paparazzi.” The album will later earn a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year and win a Grammy for Best Electronic/Dance Album.

November: Her second major album, The Fame Monster, released. Its first single, “Bad Romance,” will climb to number two on the Billboard 100 charts, and the music video for “Telephone”—a collaboration with R&B superstar Beyoncé—will become an internet sensation. December: Appears in Vogue alongside actors Andrew Garfield and model Lily Cole in “Little Girl & Boy Lost,” an Annie Leibovitz fairy-tale fashion portfolio styled by creative director Grace Coddington.

Performs in a flesh-colored, crystal-studded catsuit at the Met Costume Institute ball in celebration of the exhibit “American Woman.” Introducing her, cochair Oprah Winfrey describes Gaga as “somebody who is saying to the world, ‘Be the best that you are.’ And so what she represents is the best in all of us, the identity of the American woman and our ability to be able to look inside of ourselves and not say, ‘I want to be like you, I want to be like you, I want to be like you,’ but ‘I want to be more of myself.’ ”^[9]

March: Appears on the cover of Vogue for the first time, photographed by Mario Testino in a cream Haider Ackermann kimono robe and a pastel-pink wig. May: Performs “Edge of Glory,” “Judas,” and “Born This Way,” on Saturday Night Live’s season finale. Her third major album, Born This Way, serves up another hit, and the title song will sell more than eight million digital copies worldwide by November, earning three Grammy nominations—including her third in a row for Album of the Year. August: Stuns the crowd at the MTV Video Music Awards when she appears as male alter-ego Jo Calderone. “Wearing a man’s Brooks Brothers suit (and prosthetic male genitalia inside trousers), smoking a cigarette, and guzzling a bottle of beer, she shocked the audience and instantly made every female star in attendance who had pink hair or wore a contraption on her head look dated.”^[10]

Appears on her second cover of Vogue—September’s 120th anniversary issue—photographed by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, wearing a Marc Jacobs pink patchwork dress that references Vogue’s first-ever cover in 1892. “I don’t really make records for people to listen and go, ‘Wow, she’s a genius,’ ” she tells Jonathan Van Meter. “I’d really like for you to order another drink, maybe kiss the person who you came with that evening, or rediscover something about your past that makes you feel more brave.”^[11] Launches her first fragrance, Lady Gaga Fame, with an accompanying ad campaign shot by Steven Klein (who had previously directed her music video for “Alejandro”). Typically provocative, the photo features a nude Gaga wearing a black mask with tiny dark figures—like action toys—covering her private parts.

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