Lady Gaga certainly isn’t the first female pop star to get experimental with her fashion choices. Madonna had her cone-shaped bras, Cher her feathered headdresses, Cyndi her neon hairdos. Right now, we’re definitely at a high point in the history of female singers’ creative sartorial decisions, with Rihanna going military-bondage chic, Katy Perry aiming for 1950s pin-up girl, Ke$ha choosing to bathe with glitter instead of soap, and Beyoncé wearing whatever she pleases.

But even amongst this wide array of exciting fashion, Gaga stands out. Unlike her contemporaries, Gaga isn’t trying to be pretty.

As weird as Rihanna’s straps-and-studs ensembles get, as much as Ke$ha (charmingly) overdoes her eye makeup, there’s little doubt that the vast majority of pop starlets want to be seen as beautiful and sexy. These women make bold clothing choices, but the main goal is to be attractive in new and exciting ways, to use fashion to make themselves appear even more gorgeous and desirable. If the rare outfit isn’t exactly flattering, their general aesthetics assure us that it was intended to be.

But Gaga is doing something different. She frequently wears outfits that distort her body, masks that cover most of, if not all of, her face. She smears herself with blood, adds random growths to her midsection, and dons contraptions too complicated to move in. Gaga’s not trying for beauty, at least not in the conventional, physical sense that other pop stars are. She uses her body as a portable museum, showcasing works of art on her own flesh, whether or not they happen to make her body or face look especially alluring.

What’s most exciting about Gaga’s aesthetic is that it’s working. Although there will always be a lot of people who dismiss her and others like her as freaks, there are also many, including me, who do find her beautiful and sexy. Unlike women like Rihanna and Ke$ha and Katy Perry and Beyoncé, all of whom are naturally pretty enough to have ended up in modeling campaigns and photoshoots even without music careers, Stefani Germanotta was not born a classic beauty. But by making herself into Lady Gaga, by creating a signature style that has inspired so many other artists, she has made herself into a glamorous pop star, even without the prom queen looks of her peers. She’s a model now, and a fashion icon in the making.

The one concerning thing about the way Gaga presents herself is that even she is not immune to the pressure on female pop artists to strip down as much as possible. She has the hard-won “perfect” body expected of those in her profession, and she shows it off, in her own Gaga way. It seems that even Gaga, with her own strange brand of freakshow sexiness, can’t entirely escape the demands of a patriarchal system for women to bare their bodies in order to be sexual. But if anyone’s breaking free of rigid conceptions of beauty and fashion, it’s her.

Comments

This post currently has 7 comments/trackbacks.
You can read the comments or leave your own thoughts.

Trackbacks

From Psych Central's website:
PsychCentral (March 20, 2010)

    Last reviewed: 20 Mar 2010