Lady Gaga has hung up her meat dress and traded her monster persona for a character whose style-defining look is less outlandish: a pastel pink, wide-brimmed felt velour hat with a white ribbon.
She’s worn variations of it for weeks now while promoting her new album, Joanne, which features a profile shot of a topless, au natural Gaga donning the light pink head-topper.
She wore it with a silver ribbon that matched her metallic fringe hot pants while performing the country-pop song “A-Yo” during her first of two SNL performances this past weekend, and sported a ribbonless version as she belted out “Million Reasons,” both singles off the album.
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Finally, she left the studio wearing yet another version of the 70s-esque hat, this one in robin’s egg blue fastened with an exaggeratedly long feather.
Compared to some of the pop superstar’s more dramatic headgear choices—from telephone and teacup fascinators to an umbrella-sized sunhat fashioned from her own hair and a towering, triangular headpiece that resembled a giant lint-covered tortilla chip—Gaga’s preferred topper-of-the-moment is a stylish understatement.
Yet to wear any hat is to court attention, and Gaga’s timeless, stripped-down new look is fitting with her new album, the title of which is her real middle name.
The Mother Monster we know would likely not go on a Bud Light-sponsored dive bar tour in Nashville, as Gaga did earlier this month.
But according to Gladys Tamez, the Mexican-born, Los-Angeles based milliner designing Gaga’s new headpieces, they’re not meant to look like the typical cowboy or Western-inspired hats that one associates with the Nashville music scene.
In fact, the pale pink one Gaga wears on her album is a custom version of Tamez’s “Marianne” hat, inspired by Marianne Faithful, from the designer’s Fall 2013 “Fashion Icons” capsule collection.
“Gaga was the first to ever request this hat in pink,” Tamez, who has been friends with Gaga and designed hats for her for two years, told The Daily Beast, “because it’s her favorite color.” Tamez is now selling variations of Gaga’s pink hat, which she named “Lady Joanne.”
Gaga also wore a custom version of the “Bianca” (as in Jagger) hat from the same 2013 collection during her Bud Light Dive Bar tour.
“For Gaga I tweak the shapes, the colors, and the ribbons,” said Tamez, who has designed more than thirty hats for Gaga since she began promoting her new album.
Tamez may be biased, but she thinks hats are more character-transforming than any other wardrobe item.
“You need to be super-confident to wear hats, and they play a role in shaping personalities because the first thing a person sees when you walk down the street is your face. When I think of someone, I see their eyes and face and then I envision the hat they’d wear.”
Tamez believes hats also inspire creativity, and that the content of Joanne was partially born out of another of Tamez’s bespoke hats, the “Lady Dandy,” that Gaga was wearing when she first began working on the new album.
“She put the hat on and got in the bathtub and started writing the record,” said Tamez. “It represents more of who she is inside as opposed to her public persona. The hat is central in a symbolic sense to who this new Lady Gaga is,” she added, because the album title is both Gaga’s real middle name and the name of her late aunt, Joanne Germanotta.
“One of the things we talked about were all pastel colors, which are elegant and feminine, so the hats reflect a little bit of the ‘70s,” added Tamez.
Gaga isn’t alone: from the hippy chicks of Coachella to hipsters everywhere, hats—wide-brimmed and floppy, trim trilbys—have been spotted furnishing many a fashionable head. While not as overtly glamorous or outrageous as Alexis Colby proudly wore in Dynasty, the hat’s renaissance will only be bolstered by Gaga’s patronage.
Albertus Swanepoel, a New York-based milliner whose recent work includes designing hats for the Broadway revival of The Front Page, noted that hats have made a comeback in fashion.
“I think it’s part of expressing one’s individuality,” he said. “A hat can give you instant character and a certain look. Plus, craft is the new luxury and people are embracing that as an alternative to mass produced items.”
“I think it’s part of expressing one’s individuality,” he said. “A hat can give you instant character and a certain look. Plus, craft is the new luxury and people are embracing that as an alternative to mass produced items.”
Whether Gaga’s Little Monsters will embrace the artist’s new pared-down persona and style remains to be seen. But we can count on knock-offs of the “Lady Joanne” hat hitting Forever 21 shelves any day now.
