![]() Thus began several years of putting out singles, seeing what would stick. That led to an offer of a publishing deal (“I was excited by it, but had no idea what it meant”) and eventually to her manager, Ben Mawson, who got her signed with Warner. “That was another thing where I was like, ‘OK, this is something that maybe could help me get out there.’ ” And it did: Her agency hooked her up with a job singing for an X Factor ad, where she was introduced to a producer who had worked with Ed Sheeran and One Direction. Certainly not when she got herself scouted at Topshop, signing with a modeling agency though she had no desire to actually be a model. ![]() Certainly not when, as a teenager, she started recording herself singing covers in her friend’s boyfriend’s bedroom “studio.” Certainly not when she took that “portfolio,” as she puts it, to London clubs like KOKO, where she felt she’d inevitably encounter music-industry folks she could play said covers for. But it’s also safe to say that Lipa is not one to leave things to chance. It’s safe to say that even in a world without Covid-19, the success of Future Nostalgia was not a foregone conclusion. Bodysuit, gloves, and tights by Rui Zhou. Executive production by Creative Exchange Agency. “But at the same time, I was like, ‘For some people, this is a form of escapism?’ ”ĭua Lipa photographed in Los Angeles on December 21st, 2020. “I was terrified,” she says now, circling the meteorite. She worried it would get lost in the much bigger story that was unfolding and/or that it might feel unseemly in the moment, a feel-good collection of uptempo bangers released amid a deadly crisis. ![]() As artists like Lady Gaga and Sam Smith were deciding to delay their album releases, Lipa’s hands were tied: She took to Instagram Live to tearfully announce the album would be coming out early, right into the throes of a burgeoning global health crisis. She was thus living in an Airbnb with both a mini fridge (“I was like, ‘This isn’t going to work for a pandemic’ ”) and boyfriend Anwar Hadid (regular model and brother to supermodels Gigi and Bella) when news hit in late March that Future Nostalgia had leaked. Last winter, she returned home from Australia to find her London flat flooded and that plumbers, like the rest of the city, were in lockdown. But for Lipa - the breakout pop star of the pandemic era - the past nine months have been a study in how to not lose momentum when the world is pressing pause. It was certainly not a year to cry for the suffering of pop stars (see: luxurious sheets, gilded desserts, after-hours VIP tours). ![]() “I get tested all the time,” she’d told me earlier from across a wide table, removing the mask to tuck into that gilded egg. Now, it’s mid-December, a week when the tour would have been over, when life would have gone back to some sort of pop-star version of “normal,” doing the kind of things she’s done today, even if she’s currently doing them behind a black mask and in between a continuous series of Covid-19 tests. But up until about a week ago, she should have been on an eight-month tour to promote Future Nostalgia, which she most certainly was not. That is not to say that her day - which has involved waking up on luxuriant sheets in Manhattan’s Bowery Hotel, wearing a black silk bralette as a bona fide shirt, eating a dessert that looks like a gilded egg atop a nest in a private dining room on the 101st floor of Hudson Yards, doing an interview for the Grammys, and wandering after hours in the American Museum of Natural History, a locale chosen for its tenuous connection to the disco-space vibe of her second album, Future Nostalgia - is normal, per se. We’re standing next to a 15-ton meteorite when it occurs to Dua Lipa that, for maybe one of the first times in many months, her life is back to an approximation of what it might be in that very moment if the coronavirus pandemic had never happened.
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