Architectural Fashion: Frank Gehry for Lady Gaga

Keywords: Architecture, Fashion
Resources: ArchiDaily, The New Yorker

After Beekman Tower's topping off ceremony, we didn't think we could be surprised by anything Frank Gehry said or did any more. That is, until Archpaper pointed us to the news that Gehry designed a hat for Lady Gaga to wear to a benefit at LA's Museum of Contemporary Art. It sounds like the move from buildings to headgear was a little challenging for our favorite Canadian-born starchitect, who drew the initial design for the hat on his iPhone: "Since I've never designed a hat before, I was afraid she wouldn't be able to walk....I did have an idea that involved people with sticks holding it up, walking behind her. I didn't know how far I could go with this thing." Thanks to photos from Gaga Daily, we know exactly how far he went, and it doesn't quite stop us from wishing for people with sticks. Next time, Gehrmeister.

An Article on Lady Gaga, Frank Gehry on the New Yorker:

Celebromatic

The other day, Francesco Vezzoli, an Italian artist known for his meta-spectacles—an advertisement for a fake perfume called Greed, directed by Roman Polanski; a trailer for a fictional remake of Gore Vidal’s “Caligula,” with him and Courtney Love sharing the title role—turned up in the offices of the architect Frank Gehry with a Prada shopping bag. “Hi, kiddo,” Gehry—small, buoyant, gnomish—said. (They go back.) Out from the bag came a hat stand, on which a large silver leather headdress brooded like an alien hen: Gehry had designed it, at Vezzoli’s behest, and Prada had fabricated it, for the avant-garde, hat-friendly pop star Lady Gaga to wear during a performance with dancers from the Bolshoi Ballet, to benefit the financially troubled Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles.

“Yee-hoo!” Gehry squealed. “Lookie this! Wow! I wouldn’t wear it, but—has she tried it on yet?” (She had not.) “I would open it up a little,” he said, pulling back the silver wings to reveal a glittery translucent bauble, like a giant superball or an all-seeing eye. He touched it. “Can that be more silver?” Gehry said that he had done the initial drawing on his iPhone, which an assistant then produced: a violet scribble with a black-and-blue iris at the center. “Since I’ve never designed a hat before, I was afraid she wouldn’t be able to walk,” he said. “I did have an idea that involved people with sticks holding it up, walking behind her. I didn’t know how far I could go with this thing.”

Vezzoli’s spectacle, “Ballet Russes Italian Style (The Shortest Musical You Will Never See Again),” went up the following Saturday. That afternoon, Lady Gaga rehearsed in a tent, which had been erected for the gala on the street in front of the museum—it was draped in red satin and velvet and displayed a movie-palace marquee out front. (“It’s disco-Kremlin in the middle of the freeway,” Vezzoli said. “It’s beyond kitsch. It’s literally like a night club for the orgies of Communist plutocrats.”) She took the stage slowly, in the manner of a boozy granny. It might have been her shoes: spike-heel black patent-leather lace-up dominatrix boots, paired with ripped fishnets, a studded leather vest, a black leotard slit to the navel, and sunglasses that never came off. Her hair was a tangle of white-blond cotton candy streaked with pink. It matched the piano—pink, with cobalt butterflies painted on it—customized by Damien Hirst. The Hirst piano was reminiscent of the bubble-filled piano she played on her last tour, which was based on a Hussein Chalayan dress.

Gaga gazed at the instrument. “Holy mother, that’s unbelievable. Is it a Steinway?” she said. “Steinways are the best. The butterflies are so pretty.” She played “Speechless,” a song that would début that night, and, as the dancers twirled, the stage, like a mechanism in a child’s jewelry box, began to rotate. When the song was over, she peered out into the darkened tent, tilting her head down so she could see over her shades. “Holy mother,” she said again, and went to her tour bus.

Inside, Gaga, who is twenty-three and speaks with a prim grandeur that might have come from watching old movies, sank into a nubby upholstered seat. “I wear this all the time,” she said, yanking closed her gaping leotard. “This is like my sweatpants.” She rattled off her inspirations: Leigh Bowery, Klaus Nomi, David Bowie, Grace Jones. “It is that moment of fashion, that moment of performance, and that moment of music, combined with art and love, that makes what Gaga is all about,” she said. She sprang up and surveyed her borrowed finery: the Gehry hat; a grayish satin dress with a skirt of chandelier crystals (designed by Vezzoli and Miuccia Prada, after the costume that Giorgio de Chirico made for Diaghilev’s “Le Bal”); a brass-and-crystal mask, by Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin; a pair of tall clear plastic boots with black buttons up the side. “I helped design the shoes,” Gaga said. “They’re supposed to look like spats, and they’re just under the knee, a bit more of a tea length.” She said she felt at home in the world of contemporary art. “The objective is to always be making something that belongs in a museum. Even what I’m wearing right now.”

Night fell, and the guests began to arrive: artists, politicians, actresses, the old, rich, concerned citizens of Los Angeles, and Wladimir Klitschko, the Ukrainian heavyweight champion. (They were, to Vezzoli’s mind, the ultimate extras.) Teacups of borscht and tiny devilled quails’ eggs went around on trays. Tavi Gevinson, a thirteen-year-old fashion blogger with a small, pale face and Mia Farrow hair, had flown in from Chicago and was dressed in Rodarte. (The Rodarte sisters were her babysitters for the night.) “God—Hamish!” she said, swooning a little when she saw Hamish Bowles, an editor at Vogue. “He’s the coolest.” At the dinner hour, Gevinson took her place, along with Gwen Stefani and Brad Grey, at the table of Dasha Zhukova, a twenty-eight-year-old Russian contemporary-art lover and oligarch’s daughter who was an honorary co-chair of the event. (Roman Abramovich, another art-loving oligarch, is her partner and soon to be the father of her child.)

Performance art was on everybody’s mind. Three girls in matching golden diadems—the heiresses Tatiana Santo Domingo, Eugenie Niarchos, and Margherita Missoni—proclaimed themselves a “visual art act.” “We’re a cross between the Spice Girls and Burning Man,” Missoni said, dissolving in giggles. The blogger Perez Hilton, who says he is “Gaga’s No. 1 fan,” was wearing a black hoodie with glitter pin-stripes, from American Apparel, and white sunglasses. “The public persona of me is so different from who I really am,” he said, gesturing at his ensemble. “I wouldn’t wear this, Perez would wear this. I don’t wear sunglasses inside, Perez does. This is acting! It’s also good because if I see Rachel Zoe or someone I don’t want to look at I don’t have to make eye contact.” He paused, and took a swig of red wine. “She’s here.”

The spectacle went by in a flash. Perez sang along to “Speechless” in an otherwise hushed room. Gaga wore the Gehry hat all folded in on itself, a millinery version of Walt Disney Hall. (“She has a thing about showing her eyes—she doesn’t like to—so she closed it up,” Gehry said, over a miniature baked Alaska, afterward. “It’s O.K.”) The piano was auctioned off for four hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Larry Gagosian, Hirst’s dealer, who was the other honorary co-chair of the event. (The gross receipts for the night were four million dollars.) After a while, Gaga reëmerged, hatless, with black lipstick daubed at the center of her mouth, the geisha way, looking—an effect of heavy makeup—as if someone had punched her in both eyes. “This is the most heady night of my life,” she said, as Perez introduced her to Pharrell Williams, the musician and producer. “Whenever you start your next album, I would love to give you a mean up-tempo,” Williams said. “I was probably the last one to get it, but, now that I got it, there’s no other artist. It’s not whether you have blue eyes or a fat ass or can rhyme—it’s about a great performance, it’s about a performer willing to be theatrical beyond.”

This entry may be a little bit off my green-design topic, but I thought it is good to post it with this week's fashion design topic. Frank Gehry's architecture has been famous for its highly idiosyncratic, deconstructive form. Gehry's works go against traditional form, question the possibility of shapes. Looking at Gehry's work is just like looking at buildings that can only stand in the world of impossibility. Lady Gaga, this superstar in the current music world, is also famous for her rebellious, unusual music style. Let Gehry design costume for Gaga is undoubtedly the most amazing conversation between the architecture world and the fashion and music world.

We can see very clear features of Gehry's deconstructism style in Gaga's hat. The irregular and shapes and volumes reminds us Gehry's masterpiece, the Guggenheim Museum in Bibalo, Spain. I'm sure when Gaga wears the Gehry hat singing and performing, there must will be more dynamism instilled into Gehry's scultupure like hat. It is just going to be like letting Gehry's building model dance in the music. This interdialogue between architecture, fashion and performing arts reminds me another similar attemp made by Yves Saint Laurent, the famous French fashion designer. He once did a series couture with the style famous 19th centure artists. In that collection, there was "A Tribute to Vincent Van Gogh", where Van Gogh's Irises is used as the undulating patterns on the dress. Similarly, there were also coutures titled "A Tribute to Henri Matisse", "A Tribute to Paul Cezanne", etc. This example also proves that all forms of art are so tightly interconnected with each other, and they are constanly influencing and learning from each other.