From the first time I saw Lady Gaga at the Monster Ball in 2010, when I was just ten years old, my lifelong dream has been to design a custom look for her. It became my birthday wish every year when I blew out my candles: I told myself that, like Gaga, if I worked hard and fought for what I loved—no matter what anyone thought of me—anything could be possible.
Fifteen years later, I returned to Madison Square Garden for the Mayhem Ball—her current worldwide tour—and Gaga closed the show in one of my leather jackets. But more on that in a moment.
The aesthetic of Gaga’s early days left its mark on my wardrobe when I was a teenager. It was not just the debilitatingly wacky footwear, the blunt bobs, winged liner, and leather-studded fetishwear of Born This Way, but how these outrageous looks taught me about culture, history, and identity. It’s the way her “Bad Romance” video, featuring Alexander McQueen’s Plato’s Atlantis collection, challenged me to think about how to make fashion a more accessible industry or the way the fetish-inspired “Alejandro” latex nuns rewrote queerness into Catholic iconography, teaching me how fashion could subvert and expand the status quo. Gaga’s sourcing of immigrant, queer, and student artisans made me realize how fashion could diversify voices within an elitist system, how fashion could be a silent form of protest for inclusivity.
In the fifteen years between the Monster Ball and the Mayhem Ball—through six albums, countless tours, Vegas residencies, cross-country trips, Coachella, and rallies—I lived and grew with Gaga, sharing her distinct fashion ethos. I spent late nights with friends reconstructing her looks: the bleeding “Paparazzi” VMAs look, the Jeremy Scott Minnie Mouse dress, the cigarette sunglasses and coke-can wig from Telephone, the LED shades from “Just Dance.” My bedroom walls were filled with illustrations tracing the arc of her music and fashion.
For her new Mayhem Ball, I was inspired again to make my own piece of clothing. Mayhem is the culmination of our shared journey: It’s an album of reckoning, a legacy work that resurrects past selves and confronts inner demons—not to erase them, but to live alongside them. When I interviewed Gaga in March, we talked about protecting one’s health and happiness above all else, and how being yourself means staying true to and nurturing all the parts of oneself rather than merely the part you share with the outside world.
