From the first time I saw Lady Gaga at the Monster Ball in 2010, when I was just twelve years old, my lifelong dream has been to design a custom look for her. It became my birthday wish every year when I blew out my candles: I told myself that, like Gaga, if I worked hard and fought for what I loved—no matter what anyone thought of me—anything could be possible.
Fifteen years later, I returned to Madison Square Garden for the Mayhem Ball—her current worldwide tour—and Gaga closed the show in one of my leather jackets. But more on that in a moment.
The aesthetic of Gaga’s early days left its mark on my wardrobe when I was a teenager. It was not just the debilitatingly wacky footwear, the blunt bobs, winged liner, and leather-studded fetishwear of Born This Way, but how these outrageous looks taught me about culture, history, and identity. It’s the way her “Bad Romance” video, featuring Alexander McQueen’s Plato’s Atlantis collection, challenged me to think about how to make fashion a more accessible industry or the way the fetish-inspired “Alejandro” latex nuns rewrote queerness into Catholic iconography, teaching me how fashion could subvert and expand the status quo. Gaga’s sourcing of immigrant, queer, and student artisans made me realize how fashion could diversify voices within an elitist system, how fashion could be a silent form of protest for inclusivity.
In the fifteen years between the Monster Ball and the Mayhem Ball—through six albums, countless tours, Vegas residencies, cross-country trips, Coachella, and rallies—I lived and grew with Gaga, sharing her distinct fashion ethos. I spent late nights with friends reconstructing her looks: the bleeding “Paparazzi” VMAs look, the Jeremy Scott Minnie Mouse dress, the cigarette sunglasses and coke-can wig from Telephone, the LED shades from “Just Dance.” My bedroom walls were filled with illustrations tracing the arc of her music and fashion.
For her new Mayhem Ball, I was inspired again to make my own piece of clothing. Mayhem is the culmination of our shared journey: It’s an album of reckoning, a legacy work that resurrects past selves and confronts inner demons—not to erase them, but to live alongside them. When I interviewed Gaga in March, we talked about protecting one s health and happiness above all else, and how being yourself means staying true to and nurturing all the parts of oneself rather than merely the part you share with the outside world.
Instagram content
Fashion-wise, with the album, Gaga reinterprets her early tropes—fetishwear, spikes, studs, leather—and reframes them through the lens of survival and self-acceptance. That resonance inspired my design. I scavenged a Clubexx leather jacket from Goodwill and spent weeks after work learning how to sew leather, toggling between YouTube tutorials and Gaga music videos. I built in ’80s shoulder pads as a nod to Gaga’s early blazers with oversized shoulders, such as custom styles from Muto Little and Versace. I hand-sewed silver studs into the gloves to match the hemlines, mimicking the way studs line the panels of Samuel Lewis’s opening look at the Mayhem Ball. On the back, I painted “Mayhem” in dripping metallic Gothic script, meant to evoke blood.
Originally, I painted a monster claw—a tribute to McQueen—but when it turned out a mess, I repainted it into McQueen-esque skeletal hands forming a heart. On the sleeve, I painted my favorite lyric from “Vanish Into You”: “Saw your face and mine.” Then I embroidered over it with metallic thread and beads, so those words shimmered under stage lights.
The night of the show, pressed against the barricade with my mom, I wore the jacket draped over my shoulders. Gaga was teary-eyed as she sang “Million Reasons” and “Shallow,” directing the songs toward a figure on stage dressed as another version of herself—a personification of Mayhem. After Gaga made a speech about how New York taught her to fight, to never give up on herself, to authentically bring her dreams to life, she began “Vanish into You,” my favorite song from Mayhem. As she performed, she stepped down from the stage and walked next to the crowd. She smiled as her eyes caught the song lyric embroidered on my sleeve. I didn’t think twice: Suddenly, I was slipping the jacket off and handing it to her. It fell on the floor. It was picked up by staff, I thought it was lost.
After the finale, the screens lit up with a live backstage feed. There she was: stripped of her wig, wiping off her makeup, wearing a simple black bodysuit, fishnets, and leather boots. She was surrounded by stylists and her glam team, costumes from the show hung on the walls and rails around her. And then, I saw it—the spikes. My jacket hung over her chair. She slid it on, twirled for the camera, hugged her dancers, then strode back onstage singing: “Cause you like my hair, my ripped-up jeans/You like the bad girl I got in me.” My heart nearly stopped as I watched her—barefaced, stripped of spectacle, wrapped in something I had designed and created.
I thought I was hallucinating. To see Gaga, my lifelong creative hero, recognize and wear something I had meticulously painted and poured my heart into was something I had dreamed about since I was twelve years old. The full-circle gravity of realizing this dream hit me: My mom had been the one to take me to that first concert at Madison Square Garden, and now fifteen years later, despite her initial hesitance about the outrageousness of my ensemble—“it’s very…. Gaga”—we stood in the same place, watching Gaga wear something I crafted. My mom began crying beside me, proudly telling everyone (and I mean, everyone) within earshot: “My daughter, Livia Caligor, designed the jacket Lady Gaga is wearing.”