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Dear Shaded Viewers,
Matières Fécales’ ongoing romance with Lady Gaga has never been about mere dressing; it is a shared instinct for costume as second skin, as alter ego, as living apparition on stage. For the Mayhem Tour, styled by Hardstyle, their latest monster couture look does not simply accompany Gaga; it mutates with her, amplifying every note into something anatomical, emotional, and feral. It is less an outfit than a body double, the ghost of another Gaga moving in tandem with her own.
What reads, from the distance of the arena, as one seamless apparition is in fact an accumulation of obsessive gestures. Each pleat is hand sewn until the fabric holds a new architecture; each crystal is hand placed so that the wounds glimmer like fresh constellations under the rigging lights; each gash is hand painted, turning distress into a kind of sacred bruising. Feathers are hand assembled into a violent halo, each barb aligned to catch air and light, while each layer of tulle is hand cut, piling up into a fog that both veils and exposes the body beneath.
All of this began as a drawing: a line leaving Steven Raj’s hand, imagining a creature that did not yet exist. His sketch was not just a technical blueprint but a script for transformation, mapping where fabric would slice, swell, or rupture on Gaga’s body. On stage, that original line explodes into volume and gesture, the corseted torso carved in sharp relief, the slashed openings packed with crimson shine, the shoulders and collar rising like a ceremonial crest around her face.
Worn in the fever of the Mayhem set, the look mirrors the show’s emotional arc: chaos, fracture, and ecstatic release. With every step, cape-slit sleeves behave like tattered wings, and the feathered headpiece turns the smallest head movement into a signal flare, a burst of white and blood-red in the dark. The handwork is never static; under stage heat and choreography, it animates—crystals strobe, tulle shivers, painted wounds open and close with breath.
This is what makes the Matières Fécales x Gaga affair feel enduring rather than episodic: an insistence on couture as testimony to time, touch, and trust between performer and designers. Every pleat, crystal, wound, feather, and slice of tulle becomes a love letter written in labor, a continuation of a dialogue that began years ago and now finds new volume on the Mayhem stage. And at the origin of it all, in graphite and paper, is Steven Raj’s hand—proving that even the most monstrous visions begin with the quiet intimacy of a sketch. |
