{"id":39957,"date":"2021-11-11T18:36:53","date_gmt":"2021-11-11T18:36:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/?post_type=articles&p=39957"},"modified":"2021-11-12T21:16:51","modified_gmt":"2021-11-12T21:16:51","slug":"london-calling","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/articles\/london-calling\/","title":{"rendered":"LONDON CALLING: Gaga Steps Out on the Red Carpet in An Iconic Gucci Look"},"content":{"rendered":"
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LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM – November 09:
Adam Driver and Lady Gaga attend the UK film premiere of House Of Gucci in London, United Kingdom on November, 09, 2021. (Photo by Stringer\/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The other night watching Lady Gaga doing what was demanded of her stardom by daring yet again to stake her claim to another damn red carpet at the London gala premiere of House of Gucci, <\/em>I oddly and disconcertingly started thinking of Lady Di who never could put down her own stake in the way it was demanded of her in this city.\u00a0 The House of Windsor won that dare it had with her while she lived, but it keeps losing it to her since her death because her presence is no longer a reality for us old enough to remember her complicated saga as she acted it out for us herself but instead has melded into myth for the next generation as actresses –\u00a0 most recently Kristen Stewart in Spencer<\/a>, <\/em>Emma Corrin and Elizabeth Debicki in seasons four and five of The Crown<\/em> and Jeanna de Waal on Broadway in Diana: The Musical <\/em>which can also be screened on Netflix – <\/em>portray for them grandly reimagined conceptual aspects of her.\u00a0 Gaga generationally replaced Madonna in the cultural imagination before surpassing her as an actress and, yes, movie star.\u00a0 But Diana generationally replaced Diana.\u00a0 Is there a kind of magic in that or is it just the need for content in the new media age that causes all our consciousnesses to stream together?\u00a0 I choose magic for there is an alchemic quality to all myths and death can deliver these magical ingredients needed for a different kind of majesty.\u00a0 In that, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe are the attendants who had to make room for the appropriately named Prince in Diana\u2019s mythic court.\u00a0 Or maybe this reimagined Diana replacing the real Diana has to do with her having shattered the princess myth itself before she died by embodying it in ways that this new generation looking back on her can relate to since it is not frozen in its fairytale narrative constructs.\u00a0 It will be interesting to see if girls now in the thrall of Frozen<\/em>, another princess narrative, will ever unfreeze themselves from its icy charms.<\/p>\n

Gaga\u2019s own ice the other night – the diamonds that accessorized her daring-do stardom – glistened in the glow of flashbulbs as she raised the wing-like diaphanous cape on her billowing Gucci gown to catch the London breeze as she, her own attendant,\u00a0 purposefully pulled the slit in the gown to one side to display some gartered, elaborately stockinged leg.\u00a0 \u201cLook at her,\u201d I said to my companion because we just couldn\u2019t take our eyes off her.\u00a0 \u201cDrive that truck, honey,\u201d I said in admiration of her working-class attitude about that job she had to do working that carpet.\u00a0 There was a sense of her parking herself before us all and revving the truck\u2019s engine for the enjoyment of all those admiring her newly waxed chassis.\u00a0 There is always a wink Gaga\u00a0 adds to the wonder she can still experience at being the center of attention, and then a steely eyes-front-and-center-unmoving gaze as she heads for the next strategically placed flashbulb awaiting her where she once more winks our way.\u00a0 Stardom relaxes her. It\u2019s those moments in-between where the steeliness is required.\u00a0 I found myself last night wishing Diana had learned to wink in such a way – even to steel herself before we indeed stole her from herself –\u00a0 instead of finding the deadening allure of lowering her eyes in demureness. If only she had had some working-class oomph to go along with her upperclass carriage, she just might have survived.\u00a0 And yet it is because she didn\u2019t survive that she lives more than ever in our reimagined versions of her now.<\/p>\n

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LONDON, ENGLAND – NOVEMBER 09: Jared Leto attends the UK Premiere Of “House of Gucci” at Odeon Luxe Leicester Square on November 09, 2021 in London, England. (Photo by Samir Hussein\/WireImage)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I had already walked by Jared Leto on the House of Gucc<\/em>i red carpet working the rope line and signing autographs with his nail-polished fingers.\u00a0\u00a0 There is a real work ethic as well behind Leto\u2019s idea of his stardom, an egalitarianism he\u2019s developed in his other career as a rock star fronting his band, Thirty Second to Mars.\u00a0 Salma Hayek momentarily hijacked the carpet\u00a0 with her husband Fran\u00e7ois Henri Pinault whose company Kering owns Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen and, yes, Gucci.\u00a0 Adam Driver next ambled into view as Jeremy Irons\u2019s disembodied voice as he was being interviewed on some microphone somewhere was broadcast into Leicester Square where it hovered over it all, the klieg lights and Gaga and Leto having a go at stardom and the billboard-size posters arrogantly seizing the view with their oversized, overwrought glamour depicting the film\u2019s cast costumed as its characters in the clannish, at times clownish way the Guccis are portrayed in the film.\u00a0 Irons\u2019s magnificent mellifluous mumble continued to settle over us as if his own stardom were a lozenge permanently lodged inside his jaw.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Still discomfited by my thoughts of Diana at such an event, I found the sound of Irons\u2019s just-Jeremy voice comforting.\u00a0\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t exactly cutting through the frenzied clamor of the effort it takes\u00a0 to conjure glamour in 2021 but had instead enveloped it all in a velvety nonchalance that true old-school glamour can still glom onto.<\/p>\n

Later during the screening of the film after Irons\u2019s last scene as Rudolfo Gucci, Lady Gaga\u2019s own distinctive voice cut through the darkness in the audience from where she sat. \u201cBravo Jeremy!\u201d she shouted.\u00a0 She was right.\u00a0 He\u2019s the best thing in the film which can veer off into almost opera buffa at times. She\u2019s giving an Oscar worthy performance herself although I can see that some could describe it as the performance that Gina Lollobrigida\u00a0 would have given if she had been cast in the 1980s nighttime soap opera Dynasty<\/em> in the Joan Collins role.\u00a0\u00a0 I prefer to think of it as her homage to Anna Magnani.\u00a0\u00a0 The whole cast is quite good even as their divergent acting styles made me think they all had different ideas of what film they were making.<\/p>\n

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LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – OCTOBER 26: Kristen Stewart attends the Los Angeles premiere of Neon’s “Spencer” at DGA Theater Complex on October 26, 2021 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Amy Sussman\/Getty Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Gaga\u2019s competition for the Oscar will be Kristen Stewart who portrays Diana in Spencer, <\/em>the best of the Diana performances that are culturally surrounding us these days.\u00a0\u00a0 That film is described as a fable based on a real life tragedy and takes place over a bad Christmas holiday spent with the Royal Family when her sons were still children.\u00a0 The fact that this actress was chosen by the film\u2019s director Pablo Larrain speaks to the generational divide in our view of Diana.\u00a0\u00a0 Stewart captures the essence of the woman – even eerily her voice for those of us who remember it – and yet because of her own public image she modernizes Diana who would have been 60 this year if she had lived.<\/p>\n

Kristin Stewart is a lesbian who has announced that she has become engaged to her girlfriend, Dylan Meyer.\u00a0 Emma Corrin<\/a>, who was also brilliant in her own way as Diana in The Crown, <\/em>identifies as queer and has stated that her preferred pronouns are \u201cshe\u201d and \u201cthey.\u201d\u00a0 Not only does this speak to the fluidity of sexuality with which so many in the younger generation are comfortable, but also to the fluidity in the reimagining of Diana herself.\u00a0\u00a0 There is as seriousness in the tragic aspects of her life depicted in Spencer<\/em> and The Crown.\u00a0 <\/em>But there is also room in it all for camp, however unintended,\u00a0 as evidenced by the house parties thrown to watch Diana: The Musical <\/em>on Netflix and laugh at and sing along with its lyrics.\u00a0 There is even a poetic element to Corrin identifying as \u201cthey\u201d since there was so much \u201cthey\u201d-ness\u00a0 that plagued Diana\u2019s life – the \u201cthey\u201d of the Royal Family, the \u201cthey\u201d of Charles and Camilla, the \u201cthey\u201d of the paparazzi\u00a0 and tabloid press, the \u201cthey\u201d of the ethnicity of her lovers toward the end of her life.\u00a0 There is even now with this plethora of Diana films and television series and even a musical, the \u201cthey\u201d-ness of herself.\u00a0\u00a0 When I was watching the new James Bond film,\u00a0 I kept looking at the young girl who was playing his daughter and wondered if in 20 years she\u2019d be playing Diana in some further reimagining of her and another columnist would be writing about it and wondering why Diana continues to fascinate us so.<\/p>\n

Diana\u2019s divorce lawyer\u00a0Anthony Julius once told Tina Brown, who wrote The Diana Chronicles,<\/em> \u201cI never saw someone who was as much a project under construction as Diana. You could almost see the plumbing and wires as she was changing in front of you.\u201d\u00a0 Twenty-four years after her death – Kristen Stewart was seven-years-old when Diana died – she keeps changing in front of us.\u00a0\u00a0 The idea of Diana evolves as the culture evolves.\u00a0 Gaga too in her way keeps evolving mirroring who we need her to be.\u00a0\u00a0 A Diana of an earlier generation named Trilling wrote, \u201cThere’s much to be said for challenging fate instead of ducking behind it.\u201d\u00a0 In that, Gaga and Diana finally share some common ground.<\/p>\n

Brown has written a sequel to The Diana Chronicles<\/em> titled The Palace Papers, Inside the House of Windsor – the Truth and the Turmoil<\/em>, which will be published in April 2022.\u00a0 She also reimagined Diana for an essay she wrote this year for Tatler, <\/em>a magazine for which she was once Editor in Chief as she was at Vanity Fair<\/em> and The New Yorker<\/em>.\u00a0 This is its last paragraph:\u00a0 \u201cWhat would the 60-year-old Diana have thought now, watching the Oprah interview [with Harry and Meghan] from David Geffen\u2019s boat in the Caribbean with her third husband? Would she have been happy that her adored Harry had found the love she never had and sought valiantly to protect a wife so miserable that she harboured, as Diana once did, thoughts of suicide? As she might have texted her old friend Elton John with grim flippancy: \u2018Been there, done that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

That reads like a scene, in fact, in a future film. Maybe Gaga can play her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29575,"featured_media":39958,"template":"","format":"standard","categories":[38,16],"yoast_head":"\nLONDON CALLING: Gaga Steps Out on the Red Carpet in An Iconic Gucci Look - Grazia USA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/articles\/london-calling\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"LONDON CALLING: Gaga Steps Out on the Red Carpet in An Iconic Gucci Look\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The other night watching Lady Gaga doing what was demanded of her stardom by daring yet again to stake her claim to another damn red carpet at the London gala premiere of House of Gucci, I oddly and disconcertingly started thinking of Lady Di who never could put down her own stake in the way...\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/articles\/london-calling\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Grazia USA\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2021-11-12T21:16:51+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2021\/11\/gaga-feature.jpg?fit=1280%2C720\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1280\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"720\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"9 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/articles\/london-calling\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/graziamagazine.com\/us\/articles\/london-calling\/\",\"name\":\"LONDON CALLING: Gaga Steps Out on the Red Carpet in An Iconic Gucci Look - 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