At the end of my 45-minute phone call with hairstylist Brett Alan Nelson, I learn that Doja Cat’s first name is Amala. I didn’t know this, but I should have; is the title of her first album. But the Amala on that cover doesn’t really look like the Amala everyone knows now, the one who went viral in 2018 for singing “MOOO!” (also known as the song “Bitch, I’m a cow”) and who sat ringside at Balenciaga just a week ago looking like he just walked out of a bloody fight, red makeup splattered across his right eye. Some people think that being publicly known by your name is the height of fame, but Doja Cat is one of the most famous stars in the world. And nobody really knows who Amala is.
A candid photo of the outfit selection process. “Amala is very involved,” explains Nelson. “I prepared this long PDF of all the looks that we had confirmed for Paris. Then we put all the clothes in three hotel rooms, and she picked her favorites.”
Jacob Webster
Nelson is the creative director of Doja Cat. For this Paris Fashion Week, Doja Cat’s first, he designed her for six shows: Thom Browne, Balenciaga, Vivienne Westwood, AWAKE Mode, Givenchy and Monot. “When it comes to Fashion Week, sometimes people obviously want to be direct and just dress the designer for the show. They want to look good,” he explains over the phone as he takes a leisurely stroll through Paris, two days after the shows have finished. “But we wanted to tell stories, and we wanted to make things a little more editorial and theatrical, to, you know, break the internet and make headlines.”
“We are very collaborative in everything we do. I tell her this all the time, even when we’re talking about hair, makeup, accessories, and nails, no matter who we’re working with. You are the person who is out there, bringing this to light as you are.”
Jacob Webster
Some headlines from the past few days, where Doja Cat’s Paris Fashion Week looks dominated the fashion news circuit: “Doja Cat to critics of her ‘ugly’ gold makeup: ‘I wasn’t trying to look sexy ‘”, “Doja Cat Explains Her Black-Eyed, Ripped-Lipped Look at Paris Fashion Week” and “Doja Cat is really doing it.” The looks that Nelson and Doja Cat put together for Fashion Week were, in Nelson’s words, “a little screwed up,” and the answer was expected.He is, he says, completely unfazed by internet critics.
More from Harper’s BAZAAR
“I strive to be on the worst dressed list,” he says. “Because I know if someone says, ‘We don’t like it,’ they just don’t get it.” Girls who get it get it, and girls who don’t just don’t know Doja Cat. This is, once again, a celebrity who rose to fame as a meme, wearing a cow costume with potato chips up her nose. She doesn’t care what you think, and neither does Nelson.
“This Fashion Week, we had three different makeup artists that we worked with. Amala is very involved when it comes to makeup, because she’s a makeup artist herself.”
Jacob Webster
“If you want to be safe, you can hire anyone in the world to do my job,” adds Nelson, his audible disdain at the word safe. “Because I don’t want to do that.” Thankfully, he and Doja are aligned: “Neither of us likes the surface level,” even though they sometimes clash over particular looks. The goal of the week was not just to dress to sit in the front row, but to let Amala be anyone but Amala. She didn’t even really look like Doja Cat.
Doja and Nelson on their way to the Monot show. “The world is a dark place and the internet is even darker, and it’s just a bunch of people who have personal opinions that I don’t care about,” says Nelson. “They have no idea of the art we are creating.”
Jacob Webster
The duo outside of Balenciaga, where Doja’s beauty look made headlines. “Now there are all these brands that want to dress us, but before it was a struggle. I used to hear not so much that I always wanted to do my own thing. Finally, three years later, we have everyone’s eyes. Everyone really wants to dress her up.”
Jacob Webster
Each show was a new character. In Monot, she looked like an alien mime, perhaps sent to this planet to seduce in silence in a black bandeau top that looked like a censorship strip. In AWAKE mode, it appeared to be a golden statue. At Givenchy, she became a punk rocker with pierced eyebrows. “Each of the looks was her own moment and story,” says Nelson. Some of the stories they told lined up so perfectly with the ones that unfolded on the runway that you’d think it was planned. At Balenciaga, models dressed for the “war” that Doja Cat looked like she had just come out of. Nelson remembers the serendipitous moment as one of the highlights of the entire week: “We saw Demna afterwards, and she was shocked when she saw the makeup, because obviously, she had the same face they had during the show.”
“When we did the Balenciaga show, we always knew we wanted to do that kind of beat up face with it. It was a bit fortuitous, because neither Balenciaga nor our team knew what the others were doing, and the first models who came on stage during the show also had bruised faces.
Jacob Webster
Nelson also changed the look: “This Fashion Week was fun for me, because I got to dress up in her, so we would tell stories together.” In street style photography As of the week, Nelson and Doja Cat are easy to spot, even in a crowd of strutting guests. They almost seem out of place, like they’re starring in a completely different play than the rest of the fashion cast. Nelson goes around in circles trying to decide what his favorite style was, but has to admit that Thom Browne was “really cool.” Probably because it was so new to him. “It was very liberating to be in a skirt. I had never worn a miniskirt before, but I loved it,” he says.
Doja applying makeup gems to Nelson’s cheeks before the Thom Browne show. “She’s so real, and that’s why I’ve been pushing to do Fashion Week with her since the day I met her. I don’t want to sound like this crystal-loving kid from California, but I think everything works the moment it’s supposed to work. We’ve made a name for her together in the fashion industry, and people are paying attention.”
Jacob Webster
Usually, stylists stay strictly behind the scenes (towards the end of our call, Nelson even says, “Me? I don’t care”), but Amala, not Doja Cat, inspired Nelson to operate differently from her. as you are used to. “Doja and I have worked together for almost three years,” he says. “And I’ve been very careful in my work not to make friends with the artists I work with, just because it’s a job for me. But it has been very difficult for me not to fall in love with Amala, the person, because she is very special. She has become like my sister.”
Dress up for Thom Browne. “I am a farmer from Missouri. I’ve always been into fashion, but I grew up in this really small town and now I’m in Paris with all these big celebrities and crazy fashion designers. It’s very humbling, but it’s also a little mind-blowing every day.”
Jacob Webster
It is at this point in the call that Nelson begins to use the real name Doja Cat. “I want to make sure every look feels authentic. I never want to force her to do anything! Even though there are times when we clash, it’s always her.” She is always Amala.
In Thom Browne. “I have been to Fashion Week several times in my career, but now I am growing as an artist with it. I’ve been in the industry for 15 years, but I’ve never had an artist like her who is a fashion icon. I’ve never been able to be a part of something that people are actually watching.”
Jacob Webster
But the thing about Amala is that she’s not even Amala most of the time. “She’s a chameleon,” says Nelson.
Perhaps the pinnacle of fame is being so mythical that you don’t seem capable of owning a real name. To be so legendary, the only looks that make sense are the ones that seem straight out of a fairy tale (the kind you realize later in life is pretty “fucked up”), not unlike another celebrity with a pen name of Two words that most people don’t realize have a standard name.
“It’s like the effect that Gaga really had at the beginning of her career,” says Nelson, trying to wrap up the week at the end of our call. “Amala really can do anything. She could show up in a garbage bag and the whole world would talk about it. Or she could show up in a couture dress and have a diamond crown on her head, and everyone would be like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is great.'”
Tara Gonzalez is a Senior Fashion Editor at Harper’s Bazaar. Previously, she was Style Editor at InStyle, Founding Commerce Editor at Glamour, and Fashion Editor at Coveteur.
Source: news.google.com