Lady Gaga Bares It for Harper’s Bazaar
We've seen her sporting facial prosthetics, slabs of raw meat, every hair color under the sun, and more latex than a balloon factory. But now we're seeing Lady Gaga as we've never seen her before: barefaced.
Well, sort of. The pop star gets a little help from her beloved M.A.C. to fake a makeup-free look on the October cover of Harper's Bazaar, which features a black and white, seemingly nude shot of the fashion firebrand.
Photographed by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, the pair behind her new video/fashion film for "You and I," the singer sports long blonde hair with a custom-made spaghetti-strap Hussein Chalayan dress for the ethereal shoot, her second cover stint for the magazine in six months.
Last seen bashing fashion critic Cathy Horyn in her latest column for V, Gaga this time opts for a less controversial conversation about style, weighing in on her current go-to labels ("there are some amazing emerging kids from Parsons ... I've been wearing a lot of young designers," she says), workout routine (she credits yoga, Bikram, running, and surfing for her slim figure), and the impetus behind her new, softer look.
"I don't really view it as 'natural,'" she tells the magazine. "I think that artifice is the new reality. It's more about just being honest and sincere to the core of what you do. Whether I'm wearing lots of makeup or no makeup, I'm always the same person inside.
"I think the perception that I 'put it on' every day is probably not true. Don't you think that what's on the cover of a magazine is quite artificial? There's this idea that it's all natural, but everything's been staged to look natural. It is also an invention. It's just that my inventions are different. I often get asked about my artifice, but isn't fashion based on the idea that we can create a fantasy?"
Sure, why not? And like Lucky cover star Rachel Weisz, Gaga also confesses to a certain devotion to shoes. Great minds think alike!
"There's this one pair of shoes I've had for years, and they cost like $25," she says. "I have such an emotional attachment to the shoes that every time I see them, I can hear the fans and feel the bass coming through the bottom of the stage."
Ooh. Where can we get a pair of those?
For more of Lady Gaga's interview and photo shoot, visit Harper's Bazaar online and pick up the October issue, on sale September 27.
Meanwhile, Alexa Chung fronts the U.K. edition of Harper's Bazaar.
