It's Good to be Lady Gaga ... There's the Cover of Vogue (twice), the...

August 09, 2012

... fact you basically own Social Media with 28 million Twitter tweeps.

... power to tell a fragrance giant like Coty that of course you'd love to have a fragrance. On a couple of conditions. "You must want to lick and touch and feel it, but the look of it must terrify you. The fragrance is to be called Fame. It must be black." Oh, and one more thing - upon being sprayed, it must become clear. Otherwise, no signing on the dotted line.

"My God! That's Impossible! How can we do that?" reminsces the Coty suit in charge of the project in her thick French accent. And now the company has a highly lucrative patent pending. "She was really behind the most important innovation in the fragrance industry in the last 20 years."

(And since you're wondering, it actually smells good. Very good.)

Now touring the globe with her extravaganza Born This Way Ball, it's a massive spectacle that the Mother Monster hopes will, like her Fame perfume, "break the mold of what modern touring is right now." Including no video screens and a "fortress" that lets her dance in the air - 50 feet up - above a rapt audience of 30,000.

For the September 2012 issue of American Vogue, Jonathan Van Meter penned quite the interesting profile of Lady Gaga, nicely capturing both the atmosphere behind the scenes of the Ball & the ball - of contradictions - from her fame to her fans to *that meat dress* which was intended to show that beneath the skin, we're all flesh and bone.

Which reminded her of a disturbing cover image from the 1970s of the porno mag Hustler, depicting a woman being put into a meat grinder. "[It] really terrified me when I was a child. So I tried to spin all that into a space of humor and politics and sexuality onstage."

Including making an entrance in an alternate meat dress, suspended from a meat hook next to oversized slabs of beef. And while it creates a "transcendent moment" it also is a crowd pleaser: "My fourteen-year-old fans just really like the meat dress."