G.U.Y

It’s no real secret that the fashion and music industries are, now more than over, heavily dependent on one other. Take the recent slew of bi-annual Fashion Weeks and look at their headlines; Katy Perry pissed everyone off by being drastically late to Jeremy Scott’s Moschino debut, Rihanna divided her time between a trolley dash in the aisles of the Chanel supermarket and countless Instagram snaps with Olivier Rousteing and, finally, Versace’s couture collection gained more column inches from Lady Gaga’s appearance than any of the looks shown on the runway. The love between Gaga and Donatella is clearly mutual; ever since Donatella loaned out archive pieces from Gianni’s vaults to accompany Lady Gaga’s ‘”Edge of Glory” music video, the friendship has resulted in the popstar fronting Versace’s latest campaign as well as devoting a song on her ‘ARTPOP’ album to Donatella’s unattainable wealth, sass and general brilliance. It seems natural that Gaga’s recently-released G.U.Y video seems, via the use of a floor-length platinum wig, a visual extension of the advertisement campaign and more like a fashion film than any traditional music video. The Lady is known for her outfits; here are five of the best.

POP ART? OR ARTPOP?

‘POP ART’. The term has been used so often that people are no longer quite sure what it was ever originally supposed to be – is it  a movement, is it a concept, is it a hybrid or is it just a neologism? I myself used to be sceptical of the term, my knowledge of the movement extending only to the Campbells soup cans of Andy Warhol and the cartoon prints of Roy Lichtenstein, an American artist whose fabulous exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou truly ignited my interest earlier today.

Lichtenstein Poster

The exhibition was a walk-through of Lichtenstein’s fascinating career – his flirtations with cubism, his years of ‘image duplication’, his use of abstract materials and even his comic-strip commentaries on wartime America. However, despite all of this, the beginning of his career was the era which caught my eye the most; the time period in which he was intrigued by the brutally direct slogans and ubiquitous imagery of the advertising industry. Everyday items such as coffee cups and hot dogs became staples of American culture through advertising, therefore becoming (due to America’s worldwide dominance) representations of ‘pop culture’. Lichtenstein created sculptures and paintings of these everyday objects in three primary colours – pillarbox red, lemon yellow and marine blue (and, on occasion, green). The striking impact of the graphic paintings was made to imitate the eye-catching statements of American advertisement, a commentary on the way that advertisers would shove the ideal of ‘the American dream’ in the face of their prospective consumers.