Lady Gaga describes Doechii as ‘immediately legendary'
The US rapper and singer, 26, who recently performed at Glastonbury, is best known for her hit song Denial Is A River.
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The Poker Face star was reportedly an inspiration to Doechii, whose real name is Jaylah Hickmon, when she was growing up.
Doechii at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2024 (Doug Peters/PA)
Speaking about Doechii, who appears on the cover of British Vogue, Gaga told the magazine: 'You don't often see someone come out of the gate with a pen that feels immediately legendary. That's Doechii to me.
'I fell in love with her music and her raw, deeply personal perspective. The power in her words, her vulnerability, the way she rhymes with this wild mix of audacity and emotional precision – it struck me to the core.'
Doechii presented Gaga with the Innovator award at the 2025 iHeartRadio Music Awards, describing the singer as a 'lifeline'.
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She said: 'Lady Gaga wasn't just a pop star she was a lifeline. Gaga taught us that it was OK to be our real selves.'
Doechii released her first EP, Oh The Places You'll Go, in 2020, and one of her tracks, Yucky Blucky Fruitcake, went viral.
Lady Gaga at the Bafta Awards in 2022 (Ian West/PA)
Her rise to fame, however, came a few years later with the release of Alligator Bites Never Heal in 2024, which includes the songs Denial Is A River, Catfish and Nissan Altima.
Months later the rapper secured her first Grammy award for Best Rap Album, with nominations for Best Rap Performance and Best New Albums at the 67th award ceremony.
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She is also behind the viral hit Anxiety, after the YouTube video of Doechii singing the song, which samples the 2011 hit Somebody That I Used To Know by Gotye and Kimbra, resurfaced.
The positive online response encouraged the rapper to release the full version, which marked the first time she reached number three in the UK singles chart.
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The Guardian
12 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Born in the USA: Is American Eagle really using whiteness to sell jeans?
American Eagle is a US-founded fashion brand that sells jeans, shrunken 'baby' T-shirts and cropped sweatshirts to predominantly tween and teenage girls. On TikTok, users gush about their clothes in outfit-of-the-day posts or shopping hauls. This week, however, the brand found itself facing backlash over its new campaign, starring the 27-year-old White Lotus and Euphoria actor Sydney Sweeney, in which critics are alleging American Eagle uses the language of eugenics to try to sell denim. The campaign depicts Sweeney in a denim shirt and baggy jeans provocatively posing as a male voice says: 'Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.' In one now-viral clip, Sweeney is filmed pasting a campaign poster on to a billboard. The poster's text reads 'Sydney Sweeney has great genes jeans'. In another video that has since been removed from American Eagle's social media channels, Sweeney, who has blond hair and blue eyes, says: 'Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality, and even eye colour. My jeans are blue.' Critics were quick to point out the implications of the advert's wordplay. In one video that has had more than 3m views, a TikTok user compared it to 'fascist propaganda,' adding: 'a blonde haired, blue-eyed white woman is talking about her good genes, like, that is Nazi propaganda'. On the brand's own channels, users are battling it out in the comments section. 'It's giving 'Subtle 1930's Germany',' reads one. Another person posted: 'The woke crowd needs to leave the room.' Even the US senator Ted Cruz has weighed in. Reposting a news story on X, he commented: 'Wow. Now the crazy Left has come out against beautiful women. I'm sure that will poll well ...' According to Sophie Gilbert, a staff writer at the Atlantic and author of the book Girl on Girl which explores how pop culture is shaped by misogyny: 'The slogan 'Sydney Sweeney has good jeans' obviously winks at the obsession with eugenics that's so prevalent among the modern right.' Dr Sarah Cefai, a senior lecturer in gender and cultural studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, agrees. 'Honestly, what were they thinking, that a white supremacist fantasy has permission to be aired so conspicuously?' Aria Halliday, an associate professor in gender and women's studies, African American and Africana studies and author of Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture, isn't surprised by the ad. In recent years, she says, 'we have seen an influx of media reasserting the beauty of thin, white, blond, and blue-eyed people,' with many brands 'invested in re-presenting the wholesomeness and sanctity of conservative white values.' Critics have also zeroed in on the campaign's focus on Sweeney's body. In one clip the camera zooms in on the actor's breasts – lingering in a way that Gilbert sees as 'leering and unapologetic' – as Sweeney says: 'My body's composition is determined by my jeans.' The camera then cuts back to Sweeney's face as she shouts: 'Hey, eyes up here!' For Cefai, 'its sexualisation of the viewer via its voyeurism exposes western sexism as a racialised fantasy of whiteness'. American Eagle were approached for comment by the Guardian but did not respond. Fashion campaigns are notorious for purposefully sparking controversy, but the denim genre is a particularly seedy seam. In a 1980s Calvin Klein campaign, a 15-year-old Brooke Shields mused: 'You know what gets between me and my Calvin's? Nothing.' In 1995, another Calvin Klein ad featured models including Kate Moss being filmed in a basement as they undid the top button of their jeans and were asked: 'Are you nervous?' It was criticised for alluding to child exploitation. The American Eagle campaign comes at a time when the US is witnessing a cultural shift centering whiteness as well as more conservative gender roles, while the Maga movement has been linked with promoting a 'soft eugenics' way of thinking. In 2025, there are new factors reinforcing old stereotypes. For Halliday, the rise of GLP-1 medications for weight loss and the record high unemployment of Black women in the US all feed into a wider cultural shift that is 'about recentering whiteness as what America is and who Americans look like.' Some fashion imagery is reflecting this wider regression. The blacklisted photographer Terry Richardson is shooting for magazines and brands again, while Dov Charney, whose role as CEO of American Apparel was terminated after allegations of sexual misconduct, is now making content for his new brand that resembles the heavily sexualised noughties style of his former brand's advertising. For American Eagle, a brand whose biggest demographic is 15- to 25-year-old females, to tailor their campaign to the male gaze seems retrograde, if not downright creepy. However, Jane Cunningham, co-author of Brandsplaining: Why Marketing is (Still) Sexist and How to Fix It, says many gen Z-ers who are fed a 'hypersexualised visual diet' on social media may buy into the strategy. 'Their attitude may be that they are 'owning' their sexuality by being overtly sexual in the way they present,' she says, pointing to the pop star Sabrina Carpenter as another example of someone who has also been accused of catering to the heterosexual male gaze. Sign up to Fashion Statement Style, with substance: what's really trending this week, a roundup of the best fashion journalism and your wardrobe dilemmas solved after newsletter promotion Halliday says that while 'Black girls are rarely the target audience for ads,' some may still be curious to try the jeans: 'the desire to be perceived as beautiful is hard to ignore,' she says. Many gen Z-ers may not have experienced this genre of advertising, or 'intentional provocation as branding strategy', before, says Gilbert, for whom the campaign also reminds her of 90s Wonderbra ads with their 'Hello Boys' slogan. But maybe they will come to see through it. They are 'extremely savvy as consumers', she points out. 'They have the kind of language and expertise in terms of deconstructing media that I couldn't have dreamed of utilising as a teen during the 1990s. And they know when someone is trying to play them, which seems to be happening here. She adds: 'It all feels like it was cooked up in a conference room to provoke maximum controversy and maximum outrage, and to get maximum attention.' And it seems – in the business sense at least – to be working. Since the campaign launched, American Eagle's stock has shot up almost 18%. To read the complete version of this newsletter – complete with this week's trending topics in The Measure – subscribe to receive Fashion Statement in your inbox every Thursday.
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
Australian woman who introduced the hula hoop to the world – but missed out on the profits
What began with a large bamboo ring wrapped in brown paper and posted across the Pacific to an Australian war bride in the US launched what became one of the world's greatest fads of the late 1950s – the hula hoop. But Joan Anderson, the parcel's recipient and the woman who delivered the concept of the hoop to America, was left out of the loop – ignored by the toy company that sold more than 100m hula hoops before the fad was replaced. It was not until 2018 that Anderson, who died on 14 July aged 101, was credited for her role in introducing the hula hoop after her story was shared in the short documentary film Hula Girl. The film provided Anderson the opportunity to tell her side of a story that involved the thrill of innovation quickly followed by the ache of betrayal and the worth of a 'gentleman's handshake'. In 1956, while on a return visit to her home town of Sydney, Anderson noticed how many people were having fun with large bamboo hoops, wriggling them around their waists and shimmying their hips like Elvis Presley. 'Everywhere I would go, everybody was giggling and carrying on and when I asked what was going on they said, 'Oh, everyone's doing the hoop',' she said. The joy was contagious and upon her return to the US where she was living, she told her husband, Wayne, about it. He wanted to see one of these hoops, so Anderson's mother posted one over and during a dinner party demonstration of the hoop, after a guest compared Anderson's moves to those of a hula dancer, the name hula hoop was born. 'There are so many stories about where the name came from, and they are all fictitious' Anderson said in the film. 'This is the true story about it.' Realising its potential as a toy product, the Andersons contacted an associate of Wayne's named Arthur 'Spud' Melin, the founder of the Wham-O toy company, whose instincts they trusted. They met in the company's parking lot. 'There were no witnesses; just Spud, my husband and myself,' Anderson recalled. 'We told him we've called it the hula hoop, and he thought that was a great name for it.' Melin was intrigued and, as he and Wayne shook hands, he assured the Andersons that if the hula hoop made money for him, it would make money for them too. By 1958, as the popularity of the hoops – now patented, plastic and produced by Wham-O – escalated and, with sales exceeding US$30m in two months, the Andersons' phone calls remained unanswered, messages not returned. The only credit given to Joan Anderson was as the 'friend from Australia' who had inspired Melin. 'I think that bugged me more than anything,' Anderson said. 'I was not a 'friend'.' Joan Constance Manning was born in Sydney on 28 December 1923 to Claude and Ethel Manning. After leaving school at 14, she began modelling, with ambitions to become a film star. She was a diminutive figure, just over five feet tall, and was nicknamed the Pocket Venus. In December 1941, Joan was the cover girl of Pix magazine and was declared to be 'a typical Australian holiday girl' whose war work included knitting socks and writing letters. She received a picture of herself from troops at Tobruk who wrote, 'you make us forget Libya'. While swimming at Bondi beach in 1945, Joan was approached by US Army Air corps P-38 pilot Wayne Anderson, who did not make an impression until she saw him that night at a dance in his uniform. Four months later, they were married and, in early 1946, she joined hundreds of other war brides on their journey to America. In 1961, the Andersons filed a lawsuit against the Wham-O toy company and eventually settled with a small amount of compensation. 'Why be angry with something you can't change? The world isn't fair but life goes on. I had a great life,' Joan Anderson said. 'My husband lived to be 87 and we had 63 wonderful years together. Happiness is the best revenge.' She and Wayne had four children: Warren, Gary, Carl and Loralyn, three of whom survive her. Wayne died in 2007. Despite the hula hoop disappointment, the Anderson children all had hoops as they grew up. 'It was never a big deal in our family. [My parents] went on with their lives. They knew they messed up with the business deal,' Loralyn Willis said. Somalian Australian circus artist Marawa, an inductee of the Guinness World Record Hall of Fame for her hooping prowess, met Anderson in 2018 and was struck by her grace over her lost business opportunity. 'If I can be like Joan when I am 100 then I'll be happy,' she said. 'Meeting her made me realise I've made the right career choice for a long life.' Willis said her mother was 'fun-loving, adventurous and willing to try anything'. She was ziplining, parasailing and boogie boarding with her grandchildren until her mid-90s. 'Mom was pretty happy that she got the recognition in the end and that she was able to bring so much joy to people around the world,' she said. 'How can you hula hoop without being happy?'
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘I have different weathers in my brain': how Celeste rekindled her love of music after heartbreak and loss
On Glastonbury's Pyramid stage in June, Celeste appeared wearing smeared black eye makeup and a leather jacket moulded with the impression of feathers, latched at the throat. She evoked glamour and tragedy, a bird with its wings clipped. 'My first album came out nearly five years ago and I didn't expect it to take so long,' she said of its follow-up. 'But I'm here now.' Celeste broke through in 2020, her voice reminiscent of Billie Holiday's racked beauty, but sparkling with a distinctly British lilt: a controlled, powerful vibrato that stirs the soul. Despite her jazz-leaning balladry not being obvious chart fodder, she became the first British female act in five years to reach No 1 with her debut album, Not Your Muse, which was nominated for the Mercury prize. She also won the BBC's Sound of 2020 poll and the Brit award for rising star and was nominated for an Oscar for best original song (for Hear My Voice from The Trial of the Chicago 7) the year after – but her chance to capitalise on those accolades was stalled by the pandemic. She had to halt her touring ambitions. Of the years since, she says: 'Sometimes you worry: are you on your path?' Celeste was haunting and spectacular when I saw her at Glastonbury, but now, as we stroll through Hyde Park in central London, she is relaxed and laughs easily. She becomes distracted by a carousel ride – 'They're my favourite! I love the music' – then she is back to talking about the five-year struggle to make her excellent second album, Woman of Faces, which will be released in November. 'The title was kind of a diagnosis of how I feel sometimes; a device to help me begin to understand my own complexity,' she says. She was born Celeste Waite in California to a mother from Dagenham, east London, and a Jamaican father. Her mother had found her way to Hollywood as a makeup artist and Celeste was born 'quite quickly' after her parents met there. They separated when Celeste turned one and she and her mother moved to England to live in Celeste's grandparents' home. 'It was almost like my mother was my sister, because we were both being looked after by my nan and grandad.' These are happy memories, but she has 'these different weathers in my brain … I've always had this little tinge of melancholy.' Maybe, she says, it stems in part from a lack of rootedness: 'You move from America to England and you don't really remember it, but you know that there's people that you've known there and built connections with. And then you don't have that.' She wondered if she would end up with a mental health diagnosis, 'something more clinical later on down the line. But I didn't feel I really needed that.' Instead, she found solace in other artists' music, 'people's lyrics and emotions and melodies, even how they dress themselves – that's always been quite a big remedy without needing to have a professional'. While she is frequently compared to Adele and Amy Winehouse, unlike them Celeste did not attend the Brit school of performing arts, instead studying music technology at sixth-form college in Brighton and working in a pub as she got her career off the ground. 'I'm really glad I taught myself to sing,' she says, arguing that it gives her 'rawness and authenticity'. Her venture into music was galvanised by the death of her father from lung cancer when she was 16: 'When you lose someone, every day you wake up and you're stunned by the fact that they're gone. And there's a certain point where you say to yourself: I can't do this any more, and that's when you start to either go to the gym or get into a practice. For me, that was where I picked up music and became really focused.' In the mid-2010s, she started uploading music to YouTube and SoundCloud and got a manager. She was picked up as a guest vocalist for producers such as Avicii, while Lily Allen's label released her debut single. 'I worked double shifts in a pub on weekends to afford to go to the studio,' she says. 'It took my energy away and I wasn't able to sing as well any more.' But she carried on doggedly, got signed to the major label Polydor, bagged the 2020 John Lewis Christmas ad soundtrack and beguiled listeners on songs such as Strange, in which her vocal tone expresses every contradictory emotion in a breakup – resignation, hurt, bafflement, poignancy, even a kind of helpless amusement at how awful it all is – in just four minutes. She is clear that she has received plenty of support and encouragement within Polydor: 'The people that signed me came into music with the intention to make meaningful, poignant, credible music.' But at the commercial end of the industry, there is still 'a huge pressure to make money. If you're not in the top 2% of acts who have such a huge fanbase, you maybe don't get the freedom' to do adventurous work. She says that developing her initial sound caused friction. 'I was hanging around all these jazz musicians like Steam Down and Nubya Garcia, real innovators, and it wasn't easy for me to go into the label and be like: this is what I want to do.' She has managed to preserve a sense of strangeness and singularity. Unlike her earlier peppy soul-pop hit Stop This Flame, familiar to millions as backing music on Sky Sports, most of the songs on Woman of Faces don't even feature percussion – almost unthinkable in 21st-century pop – and there aren't many British singers on major labels doing symphonic jazz. She wanted 'a cinematic feel' and referenced Bernard Herrmann – a composer for films by Hitchcock, Welles and Scorsese – in the studio as she worked with the conductor Robert Ames and the London Contemporary Orchestra. 'Herrmann was a real innovator and it's reflected in people like Busta Rhymes sampling him [on Gimme Some More] all those years later. So we wanted to make sure that if we went into that territory of a cinematic string orchestra, it didn't feel like an impression of the 1950s – it sounded like something new.' With this ambitious scope and Celeste shuttling between sessions in Los Angeles and London, it took a lot longer than expected to complete Woman of Faces. It was originally due to be finished by the end of 2022 and released a year later. 'I didn't expect it to take so long,' she says. 'And if I'm really honest with you, at the end of 2021, into 2022, I experienced some heartache and I fell into such a depression about it all.' A relationship had ended. 'When you lose the person from your life that you really love, there's a grief that comes over you,' she says. The album's first single, On With the Show, was written at her lowest point. 'I didn't really want to go to the studio; I didn't really feel like I actually wanted to live at that point. I didn't find meaning and purpose in the music.' She just had the song title, which she shared with her collaborator Matt Maltese. 'I didn't even have to explain to him what it would be about, because he just knew. We spoke about the song and what it needed to be.' She had also recently seen Marius Petipa's 1898 classical ballet Raymonda. 'It's about a woman in the Crimean war and she has two lovers: one is in Russia and one is in Crimea,' she says. 'I could relate, because she was torn between these two entities: at that point, my dedication to music and my dedication to a person. And one was taking the energy from the other. So On With the Show was about me having to find the courage to let go of something, to meet back in with the path of my life as a singer.' Worse, she says, 'social media had come in to erode my relationship'. As a public figure on social media, 'people can view your relationship and have so much awareness of the fact that you're even in one. There's this really strange, invisible, intangible impression that interactions in that space can leave upon your living reality. I was upset at how much that had come to affect my personal, real life.' On Could Be Machine, a curveball industrial pop song inspired by Lady Gaga, Celeste explores the idea that 'the more time we spend with this technology, the more we become it'. 'My phone had become this antagonist in my life, via communication that I didn't want to receive and the fact it could just be in your hand. It was quite alien, in a way. I hadn't grown up with a phone stuck to my hand and it was something that I had to become more and more 'one' with in my music career.' She says that, during the relationship, love had reverted her to a kind of 'child-like state … a really pure version of yourself, before the world has seeped in and shaped you'. Losing the person who brought her into that state meant that she had to 'learn how to steer and guide' herself to rediscover it. She is leaning on other musicians to help her understand these difficult years. She cites Nina Simone's song Stars, a ballad about the cruelty and melancholy of being a professional musician. 'It says so much about the tragedy of where her life is at that moment in time, but then there's so much triumph in the fact she even gets to express herself in that way.' Another inspiration for Woman of Faces was the 1951 musical romantic comedy An American in Paris and one of its stars, Oscar Levant, who spent time in mental health institutions. 'I was really moved by what he seemed to carry in his being. And, I suppose, I relate a lot to artists who carry this pain, but their work eases it.' Whereas Celeste was previously in thrall to American blues and R&B ('the older sense of what R&B was in the 1940s'), down to the way she might 'time things and phrase things and even pronounce things', she has 'learned what my true voice is and who I really am as a person. I still have some of that phrasing and pronunciation there, but I exist a lot more as myself, therefore I sing a lot more as myself.' Buoyed up by her and others' art, does she feel happy? 'Yes!' She grins and throws her hands in the air. 'The main thing is finding happiness within the relationships I maintain around me and making sure those are kept really positive and nourishing.' She is glad to be in her 30s: 'Age becomes kind of taboo for a woman in the music industry – but then you hear people like Solange speak about women really coming into their true sense of who they are within their work. There's been a shift.' And if the happiness in her career ever dissipates, she has decided she will simply move on. 'I don't really see the need to live in a feeling of oppression, when I know there's so much freedom outside this world. And anyway, I'm sure I would find my way back to it again. But on my own terms.' Women of Faces is released on 14 November on Polydor In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@ or jo@ In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at
