August 17, 2022
Lady Gaga's Chromatica Ball Tour a Return to Form
Nia Hunt READ TIME: 5 MIN.
When asked to describe her long-awaited Chromatica Ball Tour, Lady Gaga gave an impassioned response.
"I wanted to tell a story with abstractions and art. This show celebrates things I have always loved like art and fashion and dance and music and technology, poetry, and the way all of these things work together," she recently told fans on Instagram Live.
Couture is quite demonstrably essential to her new tour, as her entire wardrobe is being protected by her team of security guards. Beginning in Düsseldorf, Germany, last month the Chromatica Ball Tour is full of magnificent costumes designed by Versace, Alexander McQueen, and many other prestigious fashion brands. Gaga has been opening her show with one of her most well-known hits "Bad Romance," for which she revived a 2007 Gareth Pugh outfit constructed of dark geometric shapes to perform in. Among her Alexander McQueen looks was a golden metallic ensemble consisting of wide-legged pants and a cropped jacket over a corset, which was on proud display during her performance of "Babylon." Even Gaga's sister Natali Germanotta has contributed to her wardrobe with a red chiffon drapery from her label Topo Studio to her performance of "Alice." Gaga sought to tell a story of overcoming adversity and trauma through her various garments, and this grand design was brought to fruition by the leadership of artistic director Nicola Formichetti and expertise of stylists Sandra Amador and Tom Erebout.
Fashion has always been a key component of Gaga's live performances, not only for the purpose of spectacle and storytelling, but also to create solidarity with fans who have been made to feel like outcasts for who they truly are. Gaga emphatically encourages her audience to embrace their most unique qualities, and this relationship is symbolized by her christening herself as "Mother Monster" and claiming her fanbase as her "Little Monsters." Her message of self-empowerment in the face of ostracism is made all the more meaningful by her massive queer following. A bisexual woman herself, Lady Gaga has been an ardent champion of LGBTQ+ rights, uplifting a community that continues to experience persecution to this day.
Fittingly, the aesthetic for which she is most famous is known as her Mother Monster style, a hybrid of science fiction and high fashion that was most prevalent during her "Fame Monster" and "Born This Way" eras. Gaga emerged with her debut studio album, "The Fame," in such stylistic looks as her bubble dress, her disco ball minidress, her black leather leotard encrusted with yellow crystals, and her ruffle-collared red latex gown. She intensified her onstage weirdness for her "Born This Way" album in 2011, an unapologetic celebration of the downtrodden members of society, particularly the LGBTQ+ community. A major storyline of the album is the birth of a new society that is free of prejudice and judgment, a concept that began to take shape through outfits made of technicolor goo and a liberal use of angular latex prosthetics. The most definitive depiction of Gaga's nascent species took place at the 2011 Grammy Awards, where she was carried into the venue in a giant egg and emerged from that vessel in beige, pointy latex to perform the album's eponymous lead single.
Gaga's Chromatica Ball tour appears to be a welcome return to form, as it is a worldwide extravaganza of the eccentric, inventive fashions that have always been intrinsic to her music and identity. During the tour, she's been politically vocal, (not unusual for Gaga) giving support to marriage equality and reproductive freedoms from the stage in the wake of the Supreme Court's overturn of Roe vs. Wade.
"I pray that this country will speak up. That we will stick together and not stop until it's right," she told the Washington, D.C. crowd.
Much like her Mother Monster days, she has employed the unconventional designs of Alexander McQueen, including a crystal harness descending from a bedazzled black leather jacket. Taking more inspiration from past haute couture, Gaga also featured multiple Christian Lacroix fall looks from 2007 and 2009 in a video interlude for the concert tour. Parallel to her repertoire consisting of timeless classics and brilliant new songs, Lady Gaga's Chromatica Ball wardrobe blends iconic looks from the prior decade with new innovations that are bound to make the same cultural impact.
