One shoot, which involved dressing a rock band, was particularly unfortunate. “I was only used to dressing models and skinny kids,” he recalled. “And I turned up and it was, like, three fat guys. I just left. That was the last time I tried to work with fat people. I think one of them was Ali G’s brother. It was so ghetto.” On another occasion he was hired to style a show for D&G. “I had no idea what I was doing,” he said. “I didn’t know I was supposed to Polaroid everything. I was calling friends, saying, ‘What do I do?’ So I just sort of put the stuff together and created this look that I thought was the coolest thing ever. And then after the show I got fired straightaway. I was so shocked! I found out later that this was supposed to be their show—not the Nicola show. It was supposed to be a collaboration.”
Still, Formichetti’s career continued to progress: In 2008 he was promoted to creative director of Dazed & Confused, but after more than a decade in London, he felt stagnant and decided to resign and relocate to New York. He picked up assorted styling jobs for magazines like V, and went to a psychic therapist to deal with problems that had dogged him for years. “I had this incredible fear of darkness, and [my therapist] helped me completely get rid of it,” he said. “I had the same thing with women. I was always more of a men’s wear stylist; it felt so natural. I wanted to make men look cool because that’s the way I dress. But he said, ‘Your true passion is women’s fashion.’ He made me remember how, when I was young, I was always drawing female characters and dresses. My mom was my muse—she would buy me Italian Vogue. I was this little fashion boy. Then it became that whole thing of not wanting to be too gay, so I had to try to become an architect and do something more proper. He helped me get rid of that, and a couple months later I met Gaga.”
HAVING SEEN A FEW of her videos, Formichetti thought Gaga had something special. He convinced V to let him do a shoot with her in Malibu, a futuristic take on Marilyn Monroe in the surf. “She arrived fully dressed, in hair and makeup, wearing shoulder pads and this leather dress and heels and shades—at 8 a.m. on the beach,” said Formichetti, laughing. “I was going, This bitch is crazy! She is the real deal. We fell in love with each other, totally. It felt really organic. At the end of the shoot, she said she was going on The Ellen DeGeneres Show the next day and asked if I could maybe help her with that. So I gave her this amazing Nasir Mazhar orb hat, and she wore it with this cool denim jumpsuit. She sat at the piano and did ‘Poker Face.’ I was completely mesmerized. I’d never really experienced the power of pop music and performance and fashion together like that.”
