Lady Gucci is just the latest guise of the ever transmutable Lady Gaga
Like Lon Chaney, the great silent actor known as “The Man of a Thousand Faces”, Lady Gaga has traversed roles, from music to fashion to film to politics, transmuting with creative fluidity but remaining – sometimes with defiance – the girl next door.
Last week, the 34-year-old star – days after retrieving her two French bulldogs from a dognapping in which her walker was shot and injured – posted a photo of herself beside actor Adam Driver in which she was wearing a white fur hat and was draped in gold jewellery. It was a publicity shot from Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci,a forthcomingfilmbased on the story of Patrizia Reggiani, aka the Black Widow (played by Gaga), who married – and later had killed – Maurizio Gucci, head of the luxury fashion house.
More than a 10th of Gaga’s 40 million Instagram followers “hearted” the picture, not to speak of her 84 million followers on Twitter, and 56 million on
Facebook. The legions of “Little Monsters”, as Gaga fans are called, that first adopted her as a transnational symbol of authenticity and inclusivity are numerous. She used them to launch an Amazon cosmetics line, Haus Laboratories, that draws inspiration from her early days as an aspiring singer with a quirky, powerful presence on stage in the clubs of downtown New York.
“Colour is completely transformative – it’s powerful, it’s beautiful, and it’s how I found my voice with makeup,” the singer told a trade magazine last year. Asked if she would ever bend her values to commercial proposes, she responded flatly: “The answer is no. No deal. No message of self-acceptance, no deal.”
But while Gaga’s cosmetics line could turn her $274m fortune into a billion dollar one, Gaga’s voice itself remains key. It’s carried her through numerous albums – and an intimate Academy Awards performance of the song Shallow (from her Oscar-nominated turn in A Star is Born) with Bradley Cooper; a rendition of the US national anthem at Joe Biden’s inauguration in January; and a concert to celebrate Apple’s new starship headquarters in Cupertino.
All told, noted Dorian Lynsky in the Guardian in 2011, “few popular musicmakers … have managed to create new codes embracing sexual ambiguity, sartorial flair, harlequin games”. Gaga, Lynsky wrote, was “a chameleon and visionary, a singer and composer, a musician and dancer, [who] has brought the notion of art, a tantalising blend of high concept and trash aesthetic, back to the tired halls of the Top 40.”
But that was a decade ago. In the intervening years, Gaga – whose real name is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta – has become something more. “Lady Gaga is our generation’s Barbra Streisand,” Evelyn McDonnell, author of Women Who Rock: Bessie to Beyoncé. Girl Groups to Riot Grrrl, told the Observer. At least in terms of having a huge music career, and now a huge movie career, and doing the inauguration, in which she seemed to be channelling Streisand.”
“She has that quirky signature that Streisand has in Funny Girl, a huge fanbase in the LBGTQ community, and also the political activism,” says McDonnell. “There are a lot of parallels there, but Lady Gaga is also coming out of a different era of punk and techno.”
The Gaga phenomenon then – she of a thousand faces and who once claimed “I would rather die than have my fans not see me in a pair of high heels” – shows no signs of slowing: she is merely moving to a new platform.
She has knack of knowing who to call on. By some accounts, her former creative director – and former beau – Matthew Williams, now creative director of Givenchy, helped Gaga harness her original shape-shifting persona. At various times, she’s called on top fashion photographers and video directors such as Jonas Åkerlund, who filmed the promo for her song Paparazzi, among others, to help summon the Gaga muse.
Working with Blade Runner director Ridley Scott is only the latest sortie. According to Vanity Fair, Angelina Jolie and Leonardo DiCaprio were once rumoured to be up for House of Gucci; at another juncture, Penelope Cruz was headed for the lead role.
The plot follows Reggiani, an Italian socialite, who married Gucci, the twentysomething grandson of Gucci founder Guccio Gucci, in 1972. The couple became a staple item in Italian newspapers. Reggiani, often in dark sunglasses and gaudy jewellery, looked “like a Milanese Elizabeth Taylor,” according to Vogue.
Lady Gucci, as she became known, became famous for her lifestyle and the bills that came due with it. She sailed the Caribbean on her 200ft yacht or to the only non-Italian Gucci store on Gozo. At peak spending, she managed £9,000 a month on orchids. And she furnished the public with some memorable sayings, such as: “I would rather weep in a Rolls-Royce than be happy on a bicycle.” After being convicted of hiring a hitman to kill her now ex-husband, Maurizio, she was asked why she hadn’t shot him herself. She replied: “I didn’t want to miss.”
For Gaga, the options are open. Based in LA, the ex-New Yorker finds herself at the centre of progressive political power, thanks in part to Kamala Harris’s deep roots in the music business, via her entertainment business husband Doug Emhoff. Gaga, like Streisand before her, travels in the company of showbusiness and political society, from Michelle and Barack Obama in Rancho Mirage, to Bel-Air’s Jay-Z and Beyoncé, and the Oprah-Sussex enclave of Montecito.
“I think it’s about who she is. It’s about being queer, but not in a sexual way, and not being straight and proud of the way you are,” says McDonnell. “She comes out of a multi-sexual and multicultural club environment – the New York environment. It’s that Funny Girlthing, but in an extreme form.”
Susie Cave’s Brighton kitchen is painted a very specific bruised-peach pink and the reflected colour on her skin makes it look as though she’s carved from soap. Until she married musician Nick Cave, she was Susie Bick, the 90s model discovered by photographer Steven Meisel on a flight to New York at 14 years old. David Bailey took her under his wing and her very white skin and very black hair helped shape a career that saw her on the cover of two Roxy Music records, shot for ad campaigns, including Yves Saint Laurent and Christian Dior, and naked on the catwalk in Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter. Hers was one of those fabled stories – she was a girl who felt out of place, so hitchhiked away from her Devonshire boarding school on a milk float to find glamour and fame. “I spent most of my life running away on milk floats,” she smiles today. As a teenager, “I was, umm, wilful. At 15 I caught a plane to Japan with 20p in my pocket. Made loads of money. Came back all grown up!” The people she met along the way, as if tin men and lions, helped shape the woman she became, and then, in 2014, the brand she launched. Now, at 54, there is only a fine line between the two; a concealed zip.
Susie’s friend Bella Freud introduced her to Nick in the shadow of a dinosaur skeleton at the V&A Museum after hours. The first time he saw her (Cave says, in the 2014 film 20,000 Days on Earth), he saw, “All the things I’d obsessed over for all the years”: Marilyn Monroe, Suzi Quatro, “Tinker Bell trapped in the drawer, Carolyn Jones dying in Elvis’s arms and Jackie O in mourning.” Viewed from here, their entwined careers read like love letters to each other, but ones so passionate they have broken their banks and spilled out into the world. They married in 1999. On their honeymoon she became pregnant with twins, and in 2014, when Earl and Arthur were teenagers, she launched the Vampire’s Wife, named after one of Cave’s unfinished novels. Today, Nick is responsible for naming the dresses, choosing fabrics and occasionally modelling alongside them.
The first piece I saw, soon after the brand launched, was a jewelled charm bracelet, each charm based on one of Cave’s songs, and I remember thinking it must be the most expensive piece of fan art ever made. One of the charms was Nick’s red right hand, another was a tiny gold church – if you opened the door you could see the two of them getting married. It still strikes me as obsessive and intimate, a version of someone doodling their future husband’s name on their homework diary. Of course, I loved it on sight. Theirs was a family formed out of poems and rubies.
In the summer of 2015, Arthur Cave died after falling from a cliff near their home in Brighton. What’s the worst that can happen? This. The worst thing that can happen, happened to the Cave family. For a while they were quiet, moving slowly through that syrupy grief. Then, somehow, they emerged with a new language to discuss it; in Nick’s Red Hand Files he responded to a grieving fan with the realisation there is a way, “not out of grief, but deep within it”. “Susie’s grief,” Nick wrote, “has become part of her chemistry, it moves through her bloodstream like a force and though she often inhabits the liminal space at the edge of dreams, she remains strong in her powerlessness and obstinately awed by the workings of the world.” Three months after their son’s death, the model Daisy Lowe called, asking for a red party dress. Susie dragged herself out of bed to find the fabric and with it (a fine scarlet velvet she lined with silk) found a new sort of energy. “A lifeline.” She went to work and, since then, has rarely stopped.
“The world has been a different place for me for five years,” she says, slowly, her hair a glossy shield; she is well known for her shyness, a trait that only adds to her sticky mystique. “So everything has felt surreal and strange and not normal for a while. Even before Covid, I kind of lived like this already, in a sort of alternate universe, together with other grieving people. To create my clothes brings me extraordinary joy. To be engaged in the creative process keeps me alive. It is a survival strategy. It helps me enormously. So I feel very fortunate that people seem to like what I do. I’m happy to make beautiful things that people enjoy wearing.” Is she blushing? On Zoom, the signal stutters.
“I’ve known Susie since I was 16,” Kate Moss tells me over email. “She was always my favourite model and the most glamorous woman I had ever met. Now she makes clothes that are otherworldly, timeless and so flattering to wear.” Kate remembers being backstage at one of Nick’s concerts at Victoria Park in London, “and all the girls were wearing Susie dresses – we became the Vampire’s Wife cult, it was major.” “Susie dresses”, typically, are body-skimming and jewel-bright, in velvet corduroy, lace, or slippery silk, with a hem that falls just below the knee. The shoulders are tweaked into a snippy little point. The lightness of fabric means that when you step into one you feel a pleasant shiver, like a cat being stroked.
At Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s 2018 wedding, three guests wore Vampire’s Wife dresses. They fit both pop stars and royals: the Falconetti – high-necked, ruffled, often seen in shimmering shades of dying mermaid – was worn by Kate Middleton and Princess Beatrice. Before Susie really knew what was happening, she had created what Vogue called, “the dress of the decade”.
When I contacted a few of the Vampire’s Wife’s fans, the women whose red carpet portraits and fashion magazine covers have made the dresses famous, they all replied not just with details of how they love the clothes, but how they love the clothes because the clothes are infused with an essence of Susie herself. “Her creations are just as beautiful and special as she is,” messaged Keira Knightley. “Wearing her dresses is an occasion in itself, full of magic and decadence.” Maya Rudolph agrees. “Her dresses make me feel like a woman. And a witchy one at that! It’s that silhouette, but it’s more than that – I think she weaves some sort of magic into them. They are so dreamy.”
Florence Welch, who wears the Vampire’s Wife both on and off stage, told me she feels a kinship with Susie. “I think we both inhabit a dream world, but have found a way to pull those dreams into reality. I recognise in her the strength that takes. To commit wholly to your aesthetic vision regardless of what people consider ‘fashionable’ or ephemeral trends. There’s a subversive femininity to her creations that really speaks to me.” The clothes, she says, make her feel darkly romantic. “I think the most beautiful things have a strangeness to them and her dresses seem to have walked out of a gothic fantasy. One that is entirely Susie’s.”
During the pandemic the Vampire’s Wife has been producing face masks, too, many of which present more as objects of kinky seduction than Covid protection, and supplying them to the Royal Sussex County Hospital and local hospices. Now, every dress has a matching face mask; they feel oddly correct, silky bits of fashion rather than medical accessories. As with all Susie’s designs, “The end in mind is always beauty. I want the person wearing the dress to be their most beautiful, their most comfortable, to almost be transported, to feel sort of… encased in beauty. To escape.” She is fond of organza, for example, because it, “literally looks like you’re floating”. She uses florals, but ones that are a little bit off, with the sense they’d thrive graveside.
Invited to collaborate on a collection for H&M in 2020, she says: “I had the same things in mind, so everyone could feel graceful and fairytale-like.” It sold out in 24 hours. “Yes, it’s growing into a sort of… not a cult, but…” She has an alert on her phone for when someone uses a Vampire’s Wife hashtag, and it gives her a thrill each time. “I feel a very personal connection to them from the new young actresses to the people making little films of themselves. And, you know, every time, I feel moved.” She must prepare then, for her phone to start buzzing.
After complimenting a Vampire’s Wife dress worn by his wife, the model Liberty Ross, Jimmy Iovine (the billionaire entrepreneur behind Beats headphones) bought a majority stake in the brand. They’re on track, reports Business of Fashion, to increase revenue by 30% year on year. “Susie,” said Iovine, “is as much of an artist as the great women I’ve worked with, including Stevie Nicks and Patti Smith.” Is it possible to keep the art – the gentle darkness of the dresses, their other-worldly gothic restraint – if Susie releases the reins to American investors, allowing it to grow beyond what she calls, “A family business, truly”?
“I wouldn’t want it to be so big that it would lose its essence,” she says, slowly. “I’m very, very protective of the brand, I’ve been asked to do a lot of things that I’ve said no to, because I just really want to keep it very true to what it is.” Which is? “I’m motivated by beauty. And everything I make has to be something I would wear. Admittedly, it can be difficult – every day is a battle to keep it as it is.” Instead of following the traditional seasons and catwalk shows, Susie was inspired by the skatewear brands her sons wore, and drips designs online monthly, in limited quantities. The fashion world today, she says, is “unrecognisable” from the one she entered as a teenager. “When I was modelling all those years ago, the industry was very small. We were a community. There is a lot of bad talk about the industry these days, but I never had anything but good experiences, working with mind-blowingly talented and very supportive people. I was lost, and the fashion industry took me in and gave me a home.”
The plan with Iovine is to offer more affordable pieces (a typical Vampire’s Wife dress costs more than £1,000), as well as brand extensions including knit loungewear, handbags and home goods. It’s not impossible that the bruised pink of her kitchen wall will one day reappear on your bed clothes, or bath towel. And as the Vampire’s Wife grows, so does Nick Cave’s new venture, Cave Things, an online shop of such objects as sticker sheets, wrapping paper and a jumper for dogs that says “Suck My Dick”.
“My imagination is based in folk art, fairy tales, mystical things. And, you know,” she smiles, “it gets a little bit scary in there. There’s beauty, but infused with a sort of darkness.” Where does she think that comes from? “This is something I have dealt with all of my life, a sense of impending catastrophe, a dark force on the boundary of my vision. I try to use this darkness to create beautiful and soulful things. And I’m always very curious about… unusual things. Covid has allowed me to really indulge that side of myself. Because, well, there’s nothing else to do.”
The blog page of the Vampire’s Wife website showcases her many curiosities, recent posts having included Renoir’s nudes, a clip of a Maya Angelou poem, the final paragraph of a James Joyce story and a generous scattering of Nick Cave ephemera, a digital moodboard of muses. She, of course, has often been described as a muse herself, having inspired photographers (Helmut Newton), designers (Azzedine Alaïa) and musicians (whenever Prince was in London, he’d send her roses) all her life, but the concept still rankles. “To be honest, I find the word muse to be a little demeaning. I haven’t really got time to be anyone’s muse. However, I am a frequent visitor in my husband’s songs, I seem to be always walking in and out of them. His songs look after me. And if I am to be a muse, then I am his and he is mine.”
Through lockdown, Susie took down each of the hundreds of images she had pinned to her office walls one by one. She painted the room white and thought about where to start again. Today there are only two pieces of paper left. The first is a photo of Isabel Adjani in One Deadly Summer, dark haired, white necked, familiar. The second is a lyric from one of the many songs her husband has written about her: “Beauty is gonna save the world.” “This line has become my personal mantra,” she says, earnestly. “I intend to save the world, one dress at a time.”
The fashion story behind the Oscarnominated 2021 movie Judas and the Black Messiah, which details the final months of the Black Panther Fred Hampton’s life in 1969 before he was betrayed by William O’Neal, an FBI informant, isn’t just one about the Black Panthers’ uniform of leather jacket and beret. It’s also about natural hair.
The seeds of the natural hair movement and the anti-discrimination Crown act (Tucson, Arizona, became the latest city to adopt the law last week) were sown by the Black Panthers, the film’s hair stylist told the Guardian.
“[They] were saying ‘no’ through [their] hair,” says Rebecca Woodfork, who also worked on Marvel’s Black Panther. “The breakaway from harsh chemicals [to] embracing the natural texture of black hair was much deeper than a breakup from a partner. For black American revolutionaries, such as the Black Panthers, it was a breakup from America.”
She says that it was a new chapter of a hair journey that had been weaponised since the beginning of slavery. The Black Panthers subverted the expectations placed on black hair.
“During this time the relaxers and chemicals that did not celebrate our natural hair textures were no longer going to be the status quo,” Woodfork says. “Making this statement was empowering and defied the demands put upon people of color in America.”
But it was also met with prejudice and “the assumption that you were unkempt, not professional, ‘too black’ and of lesser value to the social system”, she says. These prejudices still exist today: 93% of black people have experienced microaggressions in relation to their hair.
The Black Panthers’ aesthetic is displayed on screen. The sleek, anti-establishment look was itself a reaction to the formal look of the previous era of civil rights, embodied by Martin Luther King, which was seen as “bourgeois” by the younger radicals.
“Just as Black Power was a more assertive type of anti-race movement started by people who were disillusioned with the earlier civil rights movements, their clothes were also a more assertive statement,” says Richard Thompson Ford, author of Dress Codes. “[It was] a rejection of what they saw as the ‘accommodationist’ style of the Martin Luther King Jr generation.”
The look chimed with that of the 60s youth culture and doubled as a form of sartorial protection. “The origins of the Panther uniform was to conceal identities,” says Charlese Antoinette, costume director for Judas and the Black Messiah.
“They used items that were readily available: sunglasses and leather jackets. In the case of the Illinois party, they wore a lot of camo jackets in protests of the draft and the Vietnam war.”
Items of concealment also included the beret, which became a signature part of the Panther uniform. “According to [the Black Panthers co-founder] Huey P Newton, it was the international symbol of revolutionaries,” Antoinette says.
Elements of the look are still being used today to semaphore black power, from the cover of British Vogue’s September issue to Beyoncé’s 2016 Super Bowl performance, and Antoinette believes the look has stood the test of time because of “its sleek, clean, minimal silhouettes” and the fact that it consists of items that are easily found.
“Transforming these everyday items into political statements also reminds me of this quote by Huey P Newton,” she says: “‘Power is the ability to define phenomena and make it act in a desired manner.’”