The New York Times on Lady Gaga as the next species of celebrity - one that creates her identity from pieces of others' as suit her needs.
The ultimate post-modern icon: beyond her identities as a woman, as Italian, as singer and performer. It goes as far as to anoint her as the
type of celebrity that Andy Warhol prophesied years before her birth.
This, in the Fashion and Style section of the NYT, troubles me a bit. Lady Gaga's relationship with fashion, which appears at times to be an
abusive one on her part, has yet to be fully developed. I just don't get it yet, and I'm not sure that anyone else does either. What we all can
sense, and all that we can sense for certain, is that she is changing things - and in ways more meaningful than the eradication of pants for
the fashion forward of the night scene. So just because first year of her stardom is coming to an end, it doesn't mean that we need to be
doing things like defining her influence on fashion, even if she has now made it into a Vogue editorial, because she is at least as influenced by it herself.
What I hope to see come from her craziness and (reluctantly said) genius self promotion: the final understanding that being beautiful
doesn't mean any one thing in particular at all, and being a little bit wild is most definitely a wonderfully necessary self-indulgence.
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