V Magazine Versus the Sun

Lady Gaga went topless in V Magazine and I spent longer than I’ll admit looking at the photos. She’d turned down Playboy somewhere around the same time, which is exactly the move she’d make—not modesty, just editorial control. Playboy is someone else’s story. V Magazine she can direct.

The photos are deliberate, composed, calibrated. Lady Gaga has never done anything accidentally, including taking her shirt off. There is no candid mode with her. Every image is an argument, a position, a held note. The tits are real, which her team was apparently keen to establish, and they’re great, which I’m happy to establish here.

What I find genuinely interesting about her—beyond the obvious—is that she arrived in pop doing something neither Madonna nor anyone after Madonna had quite managed: making the artificiality the entire point, the costume as the statement, the identity as an ongoing performance piece. The music is fine. The spectacle is the actual medium. She turns a magazine spread into a manifesto without writing a single word of copy.

The V Magazine shoot fits all of that. It’s cold and lit and means to be taken seriously, and she looks like she’s simultaneously in on the joke and completely above it. That combination—knowing and unreachable—is the whole trick. I’m into it.