Bubble bobble
1. Kristeen Young, 2007: 
2. Lady Gaga, 2009:
3. Wow.
4. Actually, it’s probably coincidence. Young’s dress got a lot of exposure, comparatively, since she wore it on Letterman with Morrissey as well as on the tour. But they’re probably just both riffing on the same Spring ‘07 Hussein Chalayan creation.
(Update: it turned out Young was not. Maybe Gaga was, though.)
5. And their takes are quite different. DIY vs. sleekness; dress vs. accessory.
6. Still, considering where my admiration lies, seeing paeans go to Gaga is extremely exasperating.
This is how it goes. Your favorite singer is a cult act with a peculiar trash-glamor aesthetic. One of her costumes is particularly definitive; like most of what she makes, it has distorted proportions, original details, and looks like it was made at home with a glue gun over many painstaking hours. She’s obviously proud of it and wears it on television. You get used to describing her style by describing this dress, since it epitomizes both what she’s doing now and her earlier, more punkish phase of decking herself out in discarded bread bags and miscellaneous wires.
Then a star does the same dress. She does it quite differently, and the look reflects her image as a leotard-packing disco queen, but it’s similar enough that, to any neutral parties who see the photo, the idea belongs to her, and all previous uses (Young’s and Chalayan’s both) are re-cast in her light. This is a hazard of the fame system: it re-rewards achievements according to the status of one’s career. What a cult artist wears is always vulnerable. What a star wears is hers.
7. I’m also annoyed at the general comment-response to posts about Gaga’s attire, though. It’s not that I like the woman; so long as our culture continues to give pretty youths whatever they want, there will be sentences like Gaga’s description of her Warholian Factory: “Everyone is under 26, and we do everything together.”
Under 26! They sound wonderful.
But out on the comment front, the ratio of pleasure to stale negativity (“Desperate to provoke Trying too hard Crazy Silly Doesn’t seem to understand how to be cool” – or, in the best-case scenario, “like Bjork”) was depressing. Sometimes a woman will wear a dress because it suits her aesthetic, not because it was engineered for maximum quiet flattery by two hundred clones of Christian Dior who live in a secret underground base. Especially if she is performing music on stage.
