If you know me, then you’ll know that nobody has shaped my understanding of fashion—and by extension, myself—like Lady Gaga. My bookshelves are lined with biographies of the photographers and designers behind her vision; my walls are covered in my illustrations of McQueen ensembles and posters of Nick Knight photos; my wardrobe is bursting with spikes, fake blood, sparklers, and a collection of carefully groomed wigs and embellished shoes—a growing archive of annual Halloween endeavors. (Luckily, there are more than enough costume options to last my lifetime.)
In the past fifteen years, Gaga’s discography has ranged from electronic pop and glam rock to opera and old Vegas jazz, her expertise from records to film. But through all the reinventions, fashion has remained a constant medium. An unwavering force of expression through her battles with mental and physical health, it has taught me and embodies the way fashion can speak as a nonverbal vehicle for exploration and advocacy when words and even music don’t suffice.
Capitalizing upon possibility and virality, Lady Gaga’s extensive wardrobe spectacles—ranging from battling a life size monster with her weapon of choice, a flame-shooting pyro bra, at the Monster Ball to emerging from an egg (in which she supposedly incubated for three days prior) in a nude latex number at the 2011 Grammys—has helped shape pop culture. From streetwear nudity to a camp red carpet striptease, the stadium ledge to the Seine, Gaga finds opportunity for the world to be both a runway and a stage (especially in the coming weeks, as she transforms into Harley Quinn on the big screen and launches her long-gestated LG7 album). But beneath the shock factor of her wardrobe theatrics are personal, political statements of social subversion that redefine the discourse between written and visual lyricism. “She’s a fashion designer as much as she is a singer, a songwriter, a performer, and an activist,” says creative director Franc Fernandez, a longtime collaborator and the mastermind behind the Meat Dress. Her fashion, makeup, and costume are a tangible extension of her music and her mind—and through collaborations with luxury and emerging designers alike, imbue her narrative with dimension and depth.
Ahead, five of the stories behind five of Lady Gaga s most iconic looks.
Fashion has been one of Lady Gaga’s linguistic mediums since stepping on stage for her first award show performance at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. A twenty-three-year-old Gaga—dressed in a lacey white cut-out bodysuit that emulated the silhouette and embellishments of many of her signature stylists from The Fame era—began bleeding amidst an increasingly tortured and emotive performance of “Paparazzi.” She designed the look along with her team (known as the Haus of Gaga) to convey the inner dialogue in an artist s rise to fame and the lethal relationship between fame and mental illness, a lasting battle she has explored throughout her discography. “I wanted to say something about how the celebrity sort of has this inevitable demise that we love to watch,” Gaga said to MTV in 2009. Ending the show hanging above the audience with glassy eyes, the blood-soaked Gaga left the audience in shock, galvanizing media traction and social criticism. As Fernandez later commented on the meat dress, “People were always annoyed by her drama, saying she was looking for attention. People didn’t get it. But making real art elicits hatred before indifference—because ultimately hate is still passion. And real pop is fleeting yet powerful in that it creates waves of novelty that change the status quo. It changes what will never be the same again.”
Ferndanez also notes the lasting iconography of Gaga’s spectacles, as the audio from this VMA’s performance recently trended on Tik Tok. “I think we’re in a bit of a drought right now where people try speaking out against something or set out to create something that’s viral or riding a wave,” he reflects. “But the thing about Lady Gaga is that she’s extraordinarily earnest. She’s a kind of a method actor—a method actor, performer, songwriter, and designer—where she really believes and lives and embodies the narrative of everything she creates, regardless of medium. That allows her to create rather than ride the waves of pop culture. It’s a form of authenticity that can’t be shackled or manufactured.”
Barely a month after her provocative 2009 VMA’s performance, Lady Gaga tweeted a link to Alexander McQueen’s spring 2010 collection “Plato’s Atlantis” at Paris Fashion Week, announcing that her new song “Bad Romance” would be debuting on the runway. Six million people watched (and crashed) what would later be known as the first live-streamed runway show in history. British fashion photographer and director of SHOWstudio Nick Knight—who became a longtime collaborator with Gaga following this collection—recalled, “I think everybody realized, ‘Hold on, wait a minute, instead of showing this show to three hundred people, we can show it to six million?’ It was like a bomb went off.” By opening the doors of fashion week—an institution marked by prestige and exclusivity—through the digital realm, she permanently subverted the industry paradigm and transformed the accessibility and reach of haute couture. Muto cites Gaga’s unified vision of fashion and performance as the groundwork for the future of pop. “This twenty-something-year-old came in and showed the music industry what it really meant to put on a show. It wasn’t just about a song to her. It was about a visual experience; it was about fashion; it was about stylizing the music.”
Gaga had shared an early version of the song with McQueen before the collection s debut; he had also sent her exclusive samples from this biophilic series that fuses human and animalistic forms, meditating on the dystopian future of humanity after the dissolution of the earth. Gaga selected the finale look, “Jellyfish”—a futuristic dress, leggings, and his now signature “armadillo” boots clad in iridescent paillettes—for the music video, which became the most-watched video on the YouTube with upwards of 184 million views.
Though “Bad Romance” is known as one of Gaga’s megabangers, the visual lore transcends shock factors and intentions of virality. Her marriage of written and wearable expression captures the tensions between opportunity, dependance, lust, toxicity, and trauma that are often left out of discourse around the song. “There is just so much thought and sophistication that goes into every detail,” Antoinette reflects, pointing to the rib and spinal prosthetics Gaga wore beneath nude mesh bodysuits, provoking a dialogue that was excluded from social discourse at the time. “She wanted to convey this idea of undereating and sickly body dysmorphia that comes with abusive relationships.” It is one of the most emblematic manifestations of the intentionally behind Gaga’s lexicon—as well as the pillar of Gaga and McQueen’s prolific yet short-lived partnership, which ended when he took his life shortly after this final collection. "What we wanted to do is not be so literal about the story, but tell it like you would see a story told in an editorial spread in a fashion magazine... The fashion is all Lady Gaga and her team,” said music video director Francis Lawrence, who called Lady Gaga a photographer, performer, and artist as much as she was a songwriter.
In the music video, as Gaga rises from a bathtub in which she is drugged, she dons McQueen’s armor and sings the pivotal lyrics, “walk walk, fashion baby/ work it, move it, I’m a free b*tch baby,” reclaiming agency before immolating the man who sells her in the video. “She really threw us into the throws by upending our perception of high fashion and pop," Franc says.
When “Bad Romance” won eight of MTV’s 2010 Video Music Awards, Gaga s stylist Nicola Formichetti tapped the young talent Franc Fernandez to execute what would be arguably the most iconic, controversial, and impossible outfit of both their careers: the Meat Dress.
The LA-based creative director says that it was his admiration for Lady Gaga’s longtime stylist that led to their creative collaboration. “He was the only menswear editorial stylist who was cool and weird and fresh, so I added him on MySpace. I would always send him samples and messages asking to be featured in shoots, and then he randomly reached out one day saying he was working on a music video (which ended up being “Bad Romance”) with an emerging pop star, and asked if I wanted to help him on set,” Fernandez recalls. After he assisted Formichetti style Gaga on set, creating designs like the bespoke jeweled crown and harness in the music video, Formichetti knew Fernandez would be the perfect mastermind to tackle this project.
As an avid advocate of gay equality, Gaga wanted to leverage the VMA’s as well as her newfound platform as a global sensation to protest “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a 1993 bill issued under Bill Clinton’s Department of Defense that barred openly gay individuals from joining the armed forces. The dress stood as a visual counterpart to her headline at a “For the 14,000” rally in Maine. In her speech “The Prime Rib of America,” she called on senators Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe to support the repeal and evade a GOP filibuster, urging them not to discriminate against “the greatest cut of meat my country has to offer.”
“She had just had a huge year, where every day her schedule was exhaustive, every day she was making headlines,” Franc recalls. “She wanted to use this opportunity after winning [so many awards] to make a statement—to use fashion alone as a performance without even singing.” Antoinette adds that “she was so groundbreaking in her thinking. She steered her own look and her own future—she knew how to use fashion to get herself the career she wanted, to get people to understand her music in the way she wanted.”
But as one could only imagine, making the epic meat dress was no easy feat. “I was actually couch surfing at my friend’s apartment in LA at the time. I said I had the opportunity to make this for Lady Gaga but didn’t have space,” Franc shares. “So I ended up staying there with an AC cranked up and sewed rotting meat in his apartment for three days.”
In addition to the political message behind the dress, Fernandez noted that the wardrobe choice was aligned with Gaga’s influence on fashion. “Half the experimental things I worked on never saw the light of day, but I knew that I had to bring this almost impossible project to life. The dress changed a lot as I constructed it since it was a biological object.” He cites that the urgency and obstacles of bringing the vision to fruition against all odds echoed the social criticism surrounding the statement. “People wanted to see her fame and her vision rot. But ultimately the dress was preserved on display at the Haus of Gaga at the MGM in Vegas.”
“I’ll always remember watching the monitor backstage, where Nicola and I were giggling and jumping up and down, seeing the way the camera panned across the audience as Lady Gaga walked on stage covered in head to toe meat,” Franc says. “I was twenty-three and witnessing someone my age taking over the world. I remember sewing her backstage and realizing that nothing would ever be as viral. I was so emotional, and I knew that pop culture would never be the same.”
I ll always remember the first time my mom and I saw Lady Gaga in concert in an electric purple leather jacket at the Monster Ball at Madison Square Garden in 2011. An oversized crystal cross—a recurring trope that became increasingly at odds with sexual undertones—glistened on the back. As she descended the Rivington Street-inspired stage, she sang the opening chords of “Dance in the Dark,” a number that meditates upon body dysmorphia. Her “piss blonde” hair referenced a Monroe-esque style with the electric yellow Warhol used in female caricatures. This combination revitalized and married genderbending silhouettes from the Sexual Revolution with the subversive aesthetics of Pop Art in the 80s. “It was really her,” says Antoinette Muto, co-founder of Muto Little, the LA-based costume maker that designed her first custom on stage, as well as some of her most iconic looks throughout The Fame era (including the the origami “Paparazzi” dress, the “Poker Face” music video blue bodysuit, the bubble dress, just to name a few. Though her style has evolved greatly, Gaga has continued their collaboration through customs for Chromatica, A Star is Born, and most recently, her 2024 music video with Bruno Mars for “Die with a Smile.”) “She really followed fashion on a deep level. She would watch videos of couture fashion shows and go through fashion history just to see what was out there and what periods and references related to her story,” Muto recounts. “She’d mesh them together and come with a ballpoint pen, a notebook, and a bunch of thoughts on how to push the boundaries.” Similarly, the underlying cheetah bodysuit fused a 1950s corset meant to be worn as an undergarment with the provocative connotations of latex. “This is typical of how Gaga would push us to create something additional beyond the usual,” the designer Atsuko Kudo shared.
Though this opening look was simple compared to her increasingly theatrical ensembles to come, it emblemized Gaga’s prototypical grasp of fashion’s potential to amplify language and sound. “When Gaga entered music, tickets were affordable, singers would perform in jeans and a t-shirt, and the audience wouldn’t really dress up. That’s because the money was all in buying records and not in concerts. So when streaming platforms made music sharing free, the industry was in crisis—they thought it was the end of the music industry. Concerts were just intended to promote and sell records,” Antoinette recalls. “Then Gaga came along and put on a SHOW. She said ‘well music is free now, we can’t stop it, so we have to find a new means. We have to sell the concert experience—it’s about connecting with fans through fashion and performance as much as through music.”
With such outlandish artists like herself, it’s often hard for the public eye to ascertain underlying battles—beneath the debilitatingly-creative footwear, wacky sprawl of theatrics, and lyrical wizardry associated with Lady Gaga, the artist has and continues to battle chronic physical and mental health issues. LA-based designer Xtian de Medici’s custom headgear for her 2022 Chromatica Ball profoundly embodies the core of her sixth studio LP Chromatica, which chronicles her battle to a utopian haven of health she reaches through creating art.
After the first half of the concert—which includes “Alice,” “Replay,” and “911,” songs about the rabbit hole of depression, the circular nature of trauma, and a resulting mental health crisis—she transitions to ballads at a mystical, forest-like piano. “I was imagining Lady Gaga landing on the planet Chromatica,” de Medici says of his extraterrestrial headpiece. “I later found out that the mood board I was shown depicted the inside of Lady Gaga’s mind, but I was imagining her on an extraterrestrial planet, and tried depicting where her body started and where her helmet and protection ended.” The look embodies the complexities and paradoxes inherent in this chapter, drawing inspiration from John McTiernan’s 1987 movie Predator. “I remember the moment when the alien takes off his mask, and people in the jungle are like, ‘is that what the predator looks like?’ ‘It was a mask where he could see and breathe?’ I knew Lady Gaga loved prosthetics, so I wanted to execute them in a way that brought out the most emotion from her music,” he adds.
de Medici shares that he received little creative direction for the piece, aside from the criteria that it had to be pink. He didn’t connect with the color—so he coated the black mask with an experimental concoction. “I used an infrared pigment that sits on blue butterfly wings—what’s fascinating is that blue is actually a rarely occurring color in nature. The infrared pigment merely reflects its atmosphere, so by mixing it with the pink paint, the headpiece reflected the videography and light and energy around Gaga during the performance.”
de Medici says his personal fascination with poisonous dart frogs also informed his design. “They have double eyelids that change their vision and allow them to see underwater, a duality I incorporated into the helmet.” The mask in many ways embodies the disconnect between Gaga’s public image and personal battles, a dichotomy articulated during this chapter of the concert through the song “Fun Tonight.” In the song, she sings “you love the paparazzi, love the fame/ even though you know it causes me pain” to the version of herself that she shares with the public eye. She reveals, “I feel like I’m in a prison hell/ stick my hands through the steel bars and yell,” conveying the isolation, entrapment and sense of foreclosure resonant beneath the facades of many who battle for their health—no matter how industrious, resilient, or vibrant their exterior may be.
At her Hershey concert, she shared, “My friends used to come upstairs and say ‘let’s go downstairs, let’s go write some music, come on,’ and I’d be like, ‘You don’t understand. You don’t understand what I’ve been through.’ I was so sad, I was so mad, I was so f*cking mad, I was in so much pain.” Xtian’s design aptly materializes the vulnerability, duality, and hope that Gaga conveys in this chapter, as she brought her music to life despite the invisible hurdles unbeknownst to the viewer. Fifteen years and many concerts and fashion evolutions after my first monster ball, the piece embodies her formative relationship with fashion—a fearless vehicle for self expression, imbued with empathy and identity that extend beyond the written words of her music.