Matthew Williams, from Lady Gaga’s fashion tech to Givenchy
In the center, portrait of Matthew Williams (© Paolo Roversi) and from left to right, Lady Gaga with the pyro-bra, the iPod LCD glasses and the disco stick.
Light-up disco stick, iPod LCD glasses, pyro-bra… Matthew Williams, the new artistic director of the French house Givenchy collaborated with Lady Gaga, the bling tech high priestess, from 2008 to 2010.
By Ludmilla Intravaia
While Givenchy has announced, on june 15, the appointment of the American Matthew Williams as artistic director of the French house, let's go back on the fashion tech creations that the designer imagined for Lady Gaga, when he was , from 2008 to 2010, artistic director of House of Gaga, the collective of artists in charge of costumes and accessories, and more generally the image of the queen of technological bling (more info in this Boudoir Numérique paper here).
Matthew Williams collaborated with the singer for her first album, The Fame, in 2018. At that time, one of Lady Gaga's favorite accessories was her iPod glasses, fitted with two LCD screens from Apple's portable digital music player, seen in particular in her Poker Face music video, released in December 2008 in the United States (see below).
“I wanna take a ride on your disco stick”, sings Lady Gaga, in her title LoveGame, released in March 2009. A reference as sexual as it is literal, the famous disco stick being a luminous accessory, brandished by the diva, in the eponymous music video (see below). "When I play the song live, I have an actual stick — it looks like a giant rock-candy pleasuring tool — that lights up", laughed Lady Gaga, in an interview with Rolling Stone, in February 2009 (read here).
In the music video Bad Romance, one of the titles from Lady Gaga's second album The Fame Monster, released in 2009, she wears the pyro-bra, a motorized bra, signed by the American entertainment tech company Tom Talmon Studio which, remotely controlled, shoots sparks (see below).
Lady Gaga was also seen in an interview in Germany in 2009 wearing glasses imitating a circuit board (see below).
* Continue reading about Lady Gaga and fashion tech with these Boudoir Numérique papers :
- Lady Gaga in Iris van Herpen for the release of her album Chromatica
- Lady Gaga's visor-shaped headpiece catches the attention of fans
- Lady Gaga, fashion tech hight priestess, on the cover of paper mag
- Lady Gaga, fashion tech pioneer
- Cardi B, Lady Gaga and Dita Von Teese, all 3D fashionistas