Lady Gaga Dressed Like a Queen to Meet Queen Elizabeth
For decades, Queen Elizabeth II has held a special place in the hearts of millions of her subjects. In recent years, some pop music fans have regarded Lady Gaga as highly as some Brits regard the Queen. So when the two queens met in person, it was a momentous occasion for Gaga to meet Elizabeth face to face.
Lady Gaga performed at the Royal Variety Performance in 2009
Lady Gaga burst onto the scene in 2008 with her smash debut single “Just Dance.” She continued her rise to the top with hit singes such as “Poker Face” and “Paparazzi,” and quickly became pop music’s newest it-girl.
In 2009, Gaga was invited to perform at the Royal Variety Performance in the UK and meet Queen Elizabeth. Gaga performed her moving ballad “Speechless”; when she returned to the Royal Variety stage in 2016, she sang another ballad, “Million Reasons.”
Lady Gaga wanted to dress like a queen when meeting Queen Elizabeth
In a 2021 interview with British Vogue, Gaga looked back on some of her past fashion moments, one of which was her red latex gown she wore to the 2009 Royal Variety Performance.
“This is when I was in England and I was meeting the Queen, and I wanted to dress like a queen in a British fashion, and I also wanted to do it in my way,” she said, looking at a photo of the outfit. “But we thought that we would give this look of a queen a modern twist by making it in latex.”
“At the time, Atsuko Kudo was the only designer that I could think of that were actually tailoring latex in this way,” she continued. “It’s very difficult to tailor latex.”
Lady Gaga had a thing for latex
Latex is a notably unforgiving fabric to work with, but Gaga didn’t care. In the early days of her career, she had an affinity for the often-suffocating fabric.
Gaga then looked back at her performance of “Born This Way” at the Grammy Awards and the beige outfits that she and her dancers wore on stage and on the red carpet.
“I was very particular about the way the fashion looked for this performance, insomuch as the night before the performance, I said, ‘The fashion’s wrong, we don’t have it, we need it to be latex, we need nude latex,’” she said.
“If you know anything about looking for latex, years ago it was very difficult to find latex in any other place other than a sex shop,” she continued. “Where we found this latex was a bus company had latex that they were using to cover the seats of their buses, and we found the latex and we asked if we could buy it from them. So everybody’s fashion that’s made here was made from the fabric of seats for a bus.”
