VMagazine is generating buzz with its March/April cover showing singer Lady Gaga as a living “couture doll” shot by photographer Jean-Paul Goude.

The cover marks the 25^th time in the past 10 years that V has put Gaga on its front page. This time, the magazine shows her in white-powdered face makeup while biting an electrified tube light. She’s also wearing a strapless black gown by Armani Prive, a feathered pink robe and a Mardi Gras headdress.

Lady Gaga has been an admirer of “avant-garde statement costumes,” as she explained in her first V cover story 10 years ago. Then it wasn’t clear how much staying power she would have. Gaga had to prove her substance matched her style, which included a taste for outlandish costumes, like her famous raw-meat dress.

Madonna derided Gaga as a copycat, a feud that hasn’t abated as the stars still trade barbs in interviews and on social media.

V’s companion story this month says editor in chief Stephen Gan had wanted to pair Gaga and Goude 10 years ago, after they first met for sushi in New York’s East Village. The timing never worked out before now.

https://vmagazine.com/article/v118-shes-an-enigma/

The timing is prescient, considering that Gaga this week scored her first No. 1 hit in eight years on the Billboard Hot 100. “Shallow,” her duet with actor and director Bradley Cooper for the remake of “A Star Is Born,” has won multiple awards, including an Oscar for Best Original Song.

Gaga and Cooper got rave reviews for their first televised performance of the song at the 91st Academy Awards on February 24, helping to push the song to the No. 1 spot more than five months after its release.

“Gan believed in her ability to become more than another pop-star archetype,” V magazine says of Gaga. “Whatever glow he saw in her that day were the early embers of an artistic fire—one that he’d fuel and document for the decade to come.”