For the 30th anniversary gala of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art on 14 November, Francesco Vezzoli’s Ballets Russes Italian Style (The Shortest Musical You Will Never See Again) featured a performance by Lady Gaga that defied parody. Wearing a hat designed by Frank Gehry and a mask designed by Baz Luhrmann, Gaga played on a rotating Pepto-Bismol-pink Steinway grand piano decorated with blue butterflies painted by Damien Hirst while Prada-clad dancers from the Bolshoi Ballet pliéd around her. In other words, an average Saturday night. Everyone’s a little Gaga these days.
Until last week, American fans of 30 Rock, the behind-the-scenes-of-a-TV-comedy-show sitcom, had to make do in 2009 with Tina Fey taking her creamy décolletage on David Letterman and announcing that she was a virgin until the age of 24; a short-lived, thrilling rumour that Alec Baldwin was going to try to steal Joe Lieberman’s Senate seat; and the antics of RealTracyMorgan, who set fire to his Trump Place apartment via a blown-out light in his fish tank and whose Twitter feed started out promisingly enough (‘My dick is so fat it looks like r2d2’) before devolving into work complaints and self-props like everyone else’s.
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Alexander McQueen’s futuristic Spring 2010 show in Paris, entitled ‘Plato’s Atlantis’, featured alien-princess hairdos, exquisite digital-snakeskin party frocks, and 10-inch jewel-encrusted lobster-claw ‘shoes’ resembling nothing so much as Wikus’s mangled arm from District 9. It’s always fun to see fashion editors scrambling for words like 'antediluvian', but according to a press release, there’s a cyclical-ecological view at work here: McQueen is concerned about the dissolving polar ice cap and worries that we’re heading back to an underwater future.