Poker Face (15 page)

Out in the crowd, a fan was wrapped in a head-to-toe pink body stocking; it looked like a human wrapped in a giant condom. Most everyone knew all the words, and she ended her performance of “LoveGame” with what would later become a midway punctuation point in her 2010 arena tour: She thrust her disco stick in the air and jumped up and down, and suddenly the crowd was doing the same, in perfect time. She also broke out her pyrotechnic bra, sparks shooting from her breasts, to the crowd’s amazement and awe.

“Pop madness/brilliance from a performer at home in front of the huge crowds,” said Will Dean in the
Guardian
.

“Wacky pop diva Lady Gaga wowed the crowd with a stage show like something you’d see in a glitzy arena rather than a dirty festival,” said Nadia Mendoza in the
Sun.

The
Daily Mail,
meanwhile, made note of how much Lily Allen—the Brit pop singer Gaga had once said she needed to “keep my eye on”—was dressed and made up like Gaga. Allen wore a shoulder-length platinum blond wig offstage and a lilac one on, along with generous half crescents of pink glitter under her eyes, a purple jumpsuit with a plunging neckline, and one white glove, in tribute to Michael Jackson, who’d died the day before, June 25.

“On our last rehearsal day, the day before Glastonbury, I heard [about Jackson’s death], so I went over to where they were rehearsing and I was like, ‘Gaga, Michael Jackson just died,’ ” David Ciemny recalls. “And she was like, ‘Shut up, David, I don’t even want to hear that. No. Don’t tell me that. Don’t even joke about it, like, seriously, shut up.’ ” So he left the room, and an hour later, she realized it was true.

“She was really shaken up,” he says. She’d always loved Michael Jackson, and, he says, “I think she had just found out that Michael was a fan.”

She was also jarred by the rumors spreading on the Internet that she was a hermaphrodite, or a man. Video taken by a fan caught her at a weird angle, with her micro-skirt having ridden up and something fuzzy underneath, and that image whipped around online along with an alleged quote from Gaga on the subject: “It’s not something I’m ashamed of; it’s just not something I go around telling everyone.”

She let the controversy and rumors swirl for weeks before addressing the issue, saying, “I’m not offended; my vagina is offended.” (Speculation on blogs followed that Gaga was such a genius at generating publicity through controversy that she’d planned the whole hoax; sources close to her say that’s not true.)

Gaga herself noted that the really important thing here was that she’d sold 4 million records in the span of six months, and she offered an astute theory as to why the rumor had gained traction: “The idea that we equate strength with men, and a penis is a symbol of male strength, you know—it is what it is.”

Chapter Ten
Makeover

S
he continued to tour Europe in July, and it was
during this time that she met Nicola Formichetti, who was styling her for a shoot for
V
magazine, a niche, semi-outré American fashion book. The thirty-three-year-old Formichetti is half-Italian and half-Japanese and is roundly considered the most talented stylist of his generation. He’s on the mastheads of
Vogue Hommes Japan, V, V Man, AnOther,
and
AnOther Man,
and is the creative director of the UK’s
Dazed & Confused.
He’s worked with designers and brands as disparate as Prada, Levi’s, Missoni, H&M, Max Mara, and Alexander McQueen, whose work Gaga began to frequently reference and in some cases reproduce wholesale. These looks, however, read as homages rather than rip-offs; as talented as Williams was, and as brilliantly as he elevated her look, Formichetti is considered the true genius. Before Nicola, she could not get in with high-end designers; no one would loan her anything. He took her from a costume-y, gimmicky look to high-fashion eccentricity, and today designers fight for the honor of dressing her.

“[Nicola] is responsible for her hard-edge glamour look,” says an industry source. “He definitely has an elegance or finesse that it sometimes seems she’d really be lacking, because she’d be wearing so many things at the same time, or the hair would just be so weird with the rest of the shit. I hear there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen over there. But he’s done a good job with her. Her train-wreck look seems to be getting less . . . train-wreck. That’s his influence.”

The costumer who fitted Gaga for one of her tours agrees that, prior to Formicetti, there seemed to be no top-down decision-making regarding her aesthetic.

“It seemed like [her fame] exploded so fast that no one was really ready for it,” says the source. “There was so much going on that it was hard for her—for it to seem like anyone was in control. It just seemed like, ‘Make it happen, do the best you can, get it done.’ ”

At the
V
magazine shoot—like the early one she did with Warwick Saint in L.A.—her music was on the sound system. The call time was nine
A.M.
, at Splashlight Studios in downtown New York; she’d just flown in from Canada and was wearing last night’s makeup. Gaga asked for sushi, says an assistant who worked on that shoot, who recalls that as her only unusual request. “She hadn’t slept and was still wearing her costume,” says the assistant. “But she had a great, positive energy to her; she was open to everything.”

The assistant, who was “convinced after seeing her that she was at least twenty-eight,” was struck by Gaga’s Donatella Versace look, which came off in the resulting photo spread as high-fashion (and prescient: she was months ahead of the
Jersey Shore
curve). Angela Ciemny says Gaga would vacillate between pallid white and deeply tan on a whim, spray-tanning one day and scrubbing off the next, with no thought to what it might do to her skin, using tanning beds when she couldn’t afford to have fake tanner stain a costume. “It depended on the look she wanted,” says Angela.

This look was not going over well with the fashion people on the
V
shoot. “She was severely spray-tanned,” says the assistant. “She’s really short and just, like, orange. She looked like a tiny Oompa-Loompa in a bodysuit.”

Gaga kept her entourage in a back room, and the stylist doesn’t recall seeing Williams on the set. Gaga and Nicola didn’t really begin to talk until later in the day, and, according to the stylist, Gaga, in contrast to her usual, control-freak style, was very low-key.

Another source who was on the set that day recalls being struck by “the fake tan, really bad hair, and like, really cheesy style. She was three sizes bigger than she is now. But she was really nice. Behind closed doors, she’s really normal.”

This source—who also knows Matt Williams and Erin Hirsh, and is familiar with the back-and-forth relationships he’s had with Hirsh and Gaga—says that Formichetti is solely responsible for transforming Gaga into a style icon.

When he was calling in clothes for the shoot, says the source, Formichetti didn’t tell the designers who he was shooting—he knew that if he did, they’d send nothing over. Gaga knew, says the source: “She totally got it.”

She was the cover of the fall 2009 issue, face chestnut brown, hair almost white blond, pink sunglasses on some covers, blue on others. The headline: “It’s Lady Gaga’s World . . . We’re Just Living in It!”

After that shoot, Gaga hired Nicola—or, in her parlance, invited him to join the Haus. As she did on that first shoot, she continued to give Formichetti “a lot of leeway,” says David Ciemny, who was also present that day. “When she really connects with a creative person, she gives them a lot of power.” She was still insecure, and was vocal about feeling uncomfortable with her looks. After the shoot hit the stands and she found herself embraced by the world of high-fashion, she was impressed that Formichetti refused to accept clothes from designers who had been mean or dismissive about dressing her. “The thing about Nicola,” says the source, “is that he’s social, he’s on the scene, but he’s a very quiet person. He’s very closed; he doesn’t really open himself to a lot of people.” Gaga’s the same way, and they quickly identified each other as a fellow traveler.

They began exchanging ideas via phone and e-mail mostly, with Formichetti flying in for TV appearances or high-profile events. “Most stylists would say, head-to-toe, here’s a look,” says Ciemny. “But he gave her the tools. She would put the puzzle together from the pieces he’d give, and then add. She’d say, ‘OK, I love all of this, but now let me take some bondage tape and put some Xs on my nipples and then we’re good.’ ”

“As far as I know,” says a designer who’s worked with Gaga, “[her team] is Nicola and Matt. She does talk about everything being her idea, though.”

She also wound up getting back together with Williams, who now had a baby son with his stylist girlfriend. There was, apparently, some overlap. “He went after [Gaga] big-time, hard,” says a source, who views Williams as a bit of an opportunist. “He tried really, really hard, and he was around while she was with other guys. But why wouldn’t he try to get her back? This girl is the biggest star in the world, he already had a relationship with her. . . . He’d be stupid [not to] want to go to the next level.”

It’s hard to identify the tipping point for Gaga, the point at
which she went from being unknown to an entity in the ether to a celebrity to a superstar, but it’s likely her performance of “Paparazzi” at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards on September 13 was it. She showed up with Kermit the Frog, but left him in the limo, and sat with her dad during the ceremony. Hers was the first performance, which began as pop frippery, Gaga in white lying across the stage, an homage to Madonna’s breakthrough performance of “Like a Virgin” at the VMAs in 1984. Halfway through she took to a white piano, dementedly shaking her bewigged head, one foot propped on the edge of the keys. There was a cutaway to P. Diddy in the audience; he looked confused. Then she was back center stage, suddenly dripping in blood, smearing it across her face, collapsing, obscured by her dancers, then lifted by rope above the stage, her pop-culture suicide for fame complete. She even managed to make the white of her right eye look like it was bleeding. That’s commitment.

“The VMA performance was the big, total platter offering of Lady Gaga to the industry audience who might not have known her then,” says MTV’s Liz Gateley, who adds that it “confirmed” Gaga’s star power. “Hers was the most memorable performance of the evening.” She won Best New Artist. She’d designed herself to be the next day’s headline, but she was thwarted: Kanye West’s onstage bullying of Taylor Swift was the main topic of conversation in the media and the blogosphere.

After that performance, though, Lady Gaga was a mainstream celebrity in the United States. In October, she received
Billboard
magazine’s “Rising Star of 2009” Award. On October 4, she performed on
Saturday Night Live
and took part in an unfortunate skit involving a catfight with Madonna. Her musical performances on the show fared far better: “Gaga looked free and unrehearsed, and tossed off a rare medley worth watching,” wrote Todd Martins on the
L.A. Times
music blog. “For once, it was nice to see a pop star stretching herself by doing something more than showing some skin and spinning around a pole.”

“The thing I was most surprised by was her intelligence,” says dancer Christina Grady, who worked with Gaga on
SNL
and other TV appearances. She recalls Gaga as being very in control and in command, and was there when she began playing around with the radically different version of “Bad Romance” she played on
SNL
, reimagined as a balladlike intro to a medley that included “Poker Face” but was mainly an ode to New York City.

“I watched her compose that in front of us, in a room of people with her band,” Grady says. “She did it herself, off the top of her head. She instructed each band member which note to play on each part. She did it in about twenty minutes, max.”

Days after her
SNL
appearance, she was a keynote speaker at the National Equality March in D.C. and performed at the Human Rights Campaign National Equality Dinner, where President Obama poked fun: “It’s a privilege to be here tonight,” he said, “to open for Lady Gaga.” Also that month, she performed at the thirtieth anniversary bash at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The artist Francesco Vezzoli created a portrait of Gaga in his trademark petit-point embroidery. Her dress was designed by Miuccia Prada, as were her dancers’ costumes. Damien Hirst designed her piano; Frank Gehry, her hat. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were there.

On November 23, she released
The Fame Monster,
which was basically a rerelease of
The Fame
with eight new tracks. The cover was shot by famed French designer Hedi Slimane, who has also designed album covers for Daft Punk and Phoenix but is most famous for his work at Dior from 2000 to 2007.
The Fame Monster
debuted at number five on the Billboard Hot 200 and went to number one in eight countries. “This becomes essential for anyone who even remotely likes pop,” said Britain’s
NME,
adding that “it’s the moment Gaga cements herself as a star.”
Spin
magazine’s Josh Modell wrote that “Bad Romance” “plays like the best Madonna song in ages.”
Rolling Stone
was a bit more restrained, calling the album “largely on point.”

By now she was such a cultural force that even the self-righteously discriminating music site Pitchfork—which specializes in indie rock and alternative music—felt compelled to review the album. They gave it a rave, calling the first single, “Bad Romance,” “arguably the best pop single and best pop video of 2009” and “template-breaking,” comparing her to an artist working at the caliber of Madonna and Prince at their best and calling her “the only real pop star around.”

She’d also exhumed the music video as narrative epic. The Åkerlund-directed video for “Bad Romance” was notable not just for its unabashed extravagance and dark humor but for the coda: There she is, propped up on a charred mattress next to a skeleton, staring into space and smoking a cigarette—which, in real life, she’ll do once in a while—wearing a bra that’s shooting sparks, the same one she deployed at Glastonbury. It’s since become a staple of her live show.

For a girl who’d been accused by critics and peers of being little more than a cultural thief, she was suddenly the one being imitated. Fellow pop stars began copying the Gaga look, shamelessly and all at once: Fergie, Rihanna, future collaborator Beyoncé, Ke$ha, and, most notably, Christina Aguilera, who once cattily said of Lady Gaga, “I’m not sure if it is a man or a woman,” and whose new look and sound and videos are, to put it politely, heavily influenced by Lady Gaga.

The girl who some stylists deemed tacky, unattractive, too short, unimaginative, and an otherwise blank creation of stylists became, suddenly, a gravitational force in fashion. At the shows in New York, Paris, London, and Milan in fall 2009, the aura of Lady Gaga was everywhere. (Givenchy’s Riccardo Tisci was influenced as early as January 2009, when he sent a slew of bodysuits down the runway.) Derek Lam, a great American designer of reserve and quiet elegance, sent pants-less models down the runway. Michael Kors, he of the aspirational-yet-watered-down-Hyannisport look, used her music as the soundtrack to his show. Marc Jacobs’s Fall 2009 after-party—the high point of New York Fashion Week—featured Gaga as a performer and guest of honor. In Paris, Gaultier referenced the no-pants look and sent a sculptural metallic bodysuit down the runway; there were the bows-of-hair at Chanel (Lagerfeld had previously referenced her rival Amy Winehouse in 2008, and uses her other rival, Lily Allen, in ads). McQueen’s show—otherworldy even by his standards—was a Gaga-esque riot of cartoonish beauty, models tottering in the now-famous sequined “armadillo” shoes. (This was one of the head-to-toe McQueen looks she wore in the “Bad Romance” video.)

She modeled in a Grimm’s Fairy Tales–themed spread in American
Vogue
’s December 2009 issue and appeared on the cover of the January 2010 edition of American
Elle.
The fashion trade publication
Women’s Wear Daily
reported that, in the last quarter of 2009, expensive lingerie, especially corsets, was spiking in sales, a trend the industry credited to Lady Gaga. She told
People
magazine that one of her goals was to be the subject of an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.

In December, she performed for the Queen of England, suspended at least twenty feet above the stage, playing an elevated piano, gothic in its outsized splendor. She was wearing an Elizabethean-inspired red latex dress, eye sockets rimmed with red glitter. This, too, was how she presented herself to the queen. She was one of Barbara Walters’s
10 Most Fascinating People of 2009,
and dressed, for the broadcast, like her eighty-year-old interlocutor, who did not seem to get the joke. By January, she was on
The Oprah Winfrey Show,
performing on a prefab set hilariously meant to evoke a filthy East Village street, eliciting unrestrained glee in the gay men and middle-aged housewives in the audience. (She’d canceled a show the night before, claiming exhaustion; her fans, now known the world over as “little monsters,” didn’t care.)