Lady Gaga Is an Award-Winning Caricature of Herself
There’s not much that hasn’t already been said about Lady Gaga’s fashion choices at last night’s 52nd Annual Grammy Awards. It isn’t that we didn’t expect it, really. She has chosen to look odd ever since getting attention for her album “The Fame”, changing hair colors and wearing bubbles and feathers and Things That Do Not Look Like Clothes. But her music has certainly become popular.
I think it's the mace-like hand accessory that makes the outfit.
Admittedly, my own knowledge of the music of Lady Gaga is limited to Christopher Walken’s ingenious reading of “Poker Face” on BBC 1’s Friday Night with Jonathan Ross last October. Somehow, I was able to listen to that, while I have not yet been able to make it through even one full song of hers yet. I’m working on it.
Last night’s performance with Elton John was, apparently, a mash-up of her own song “Speechless” and John’s classic “Your Song”. It was very nice. And a style match made in heaven. If Elton John was a woman, he would probably dress like Lady Gaga. Or he would have, like 20 years ago. Maybe 30.
Lady Gaga showed up at the Grammy Awards last night wearing yet another inexplicable dress, inexplicably designed just for her by Giorgio Armani. It was sort of pink and glittery and very rigidly molded. It had sort of Saturn-like rings all around it, also pink, and also glittery. There was not a real hemline. It was more like the bottom of a sculpture. From the front, it revealed, well, pretty much everything. Underneath the ‘dress’ was a bottom-of-the-platform-shoes to top-of-the-head (including hair!) bodysuit that looked as though it was encrusted with diamonds. Fortunately, the bodysuit included bejeweled panties that covered up all of the Lady’s naughty bits. Close-ups of Lady Gaga’s face reveal that she was not wearing a wig. It was hair attached to a head-covering bodysuit. It was almost medieval armor-ish. Only with long, yellow, feathered hair attached.
For her performance with Elton John, she changed into another glittery get-up, this time an aqua bodysuit with high-cut legs. She was also sporting hot pink sequined triangles around her eyes. From a distance, it looked like makeup. But after she performed part of “Poker Face” and was ceremonially dumped into a machine marked “rejected”, she emerged covered in soot and her pink triangles were gone. Seems like performing with Elton John would be the ideal time to don the famous pink triangle, but what do I know? Anyway, the duet was lovely, with both of them playing piano and singing beautifully. It was almost possible to look past the shoulders of Gaga’s bodysuit, which extended both vertically and horizontally, giving her an appearance of sequined, aquamarine wings folded at her sides. And not in a good way.
It was when she took her seat that her red carpet gown and performance attire were both completely eclipsed, as was the view of everyone sitting behind her for at least 3 or 4 rows. She wore what seemed to be the same bodysuit that was underneath her Armani creation, but wore a silver jacket with fiery, lightning bolt-like thingies sticking up from the shoulders and out from her elbows. There was a hat to match. That hat was probably what might be called ‘architectural’. It sort of mirrored the lightning bolt motif, but was a bit more ‘Crown of the Ice Queen”. And it was very, very tall. Photos show a musician seated behind her looking up at it, probably wondering how he was going to see any of the show at all. Gaga herself was watching the show through pink triangles again, but this time they were a bit more subdued. They failed to glimmer quite the way her performance hot pink eye triangles did.
What can be said about Lady Gaga that hasn’t already been said? Maybe one of these days I’ll be able to look past all of it and listen to her music. People have likened Lady Gaga’s performance style to that of Freddie Mercury, but I disagree. Lady Gaga is way gayer.