Meet the Designer Behind Lady Gaga’s Mesmerizing Sci-Fi Costumes

“My personal style is . . . Gaga” was Lady Gaga’s response to Vogue’s 73 questioner, and sure enough, the sui generis style maven has already rocked 2019 with her eclectic lewks. Hot on her sensational Golden Globes appearance in a Valentino haute couture gown of periwinkle blue faille with a train that seemed to go on forever (and gave a deep curtsey to Judy Garland’s final look in George Cukor’s 1954 take on A Star Is Born), Lady Gaga is giving further proof of her chameleon fashion instincts with her Enigma tour at Park MGM’s Park Theater, in Las Vegas, where she opens the show in Tom Ford and goes Future Gaga in Asher Levine.

Levine began working with Gaga at the beginning of his career, creating leather looks for a Rolling Stone portrait and the artist’s “Marry the Night” music video. “That was 10 years ago,” he notes, “it kind of allowed time to go, ‘Wow, where did I start and where are we at now?’ ”

The Florida-born Levine, 30, moved to New York two days after he graduated high school. “I couldn’t get away fast enough,” he recalls. Ere long he had a degree in business management from Pace University: The business-savvy Levine writes his company’s quarterly projections and the reports for investors that update information on emerging technologies that can be harnessed to fashion. He launched his namesake label in a similar way to Thom Browne—by using himself as his brand ambassador, biking around the West Village in “the most outrageous leotards and wrestling singlets of neon colors,” as his friend and collaborator activist-artist Slava Mogutin recalled. “Being an up-and-coming designer, it’s my role to focus on things that other people can’t do,” Levine opines, and from the beginning of his adventures in fashion, he began integrating design with technology in exhilarating ways that soon attracted fashionistas with a passion for futurism and performers such as Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj, Rita Ora, Black Eyed Peas, Bruno Mars, Demi Lovato, Hmmm, and Will.i.am in search of dramatic, intriguing, and often powerfully sexy effects. His Harlem studio setup once included a 3-D body-mapping zone where his celebrity clients could be scanned so that their Levine stage costumes fit like second skins. Now, he prefers to use a hand scanner for better resolution. “If we are making a skintight bodysuit with electricity running through it for Gaga,” he notes wryly, “I need to know her exact geometry!”

Levine avers that he wants to “create entirely new types of product for fashion . . . outerwear pieces that should exist in this century and a heavy emphasis on accessories.” His fashion innovations were revealed to a wider public when he was commissioned to create a 21st-century biker jacket for the Museum of Modern Art’s 2017 exhibition “Items: Is Fashion Modern?”

After 12 years in Manhattan, Levine has recently relocated to Los Angeles where he found a penthouse studio through Craigslist in a converted old Federal Reserve bank. It was only after he had moved in that he realized Rodarte’s Kate and Laura Mulleavy were former tenants. “I miss the garment district a little bit in New York,” he admits, “but I’m really excited to be here—people are really supportive of creativity.” Having worked on superhero costumes, he is also sounding out potential movie collaborations. “I want to focus on productions that define the future, like when JPG did The Fifth Element,” he says, “I’m trying to find projects that are in that realm of cool future fashion.” When Lady Gaga’s team called to say, “We need something sci-fi,” he knew they had “come to the right person. I’m like a sci-fi weird alien, anyway, always have been,” he chortles.

In 2009, at the beginning of her ascent into the supernova galaxy, Gaga confided privately to Vogue’s editors that she had taken to heart the advice that Grace Jones had recently given her to stay faithful to your creative team: counsel she continues to abide by. “She knows how to foster talented people,” says Levine, citing Gaga’s stylist and costume collaborators, Tom Eerebout, Sandra Amador, Nicola Formichetti, and her sister, Natali Germanotta, “it was a true team effort.”

For the costume that he conceived, “We employed so many new technologies and methods,” he recalls, “that allowed us to do what we did in such a short time frame. I’ve been doing this a decade and there is something to say about experience and knowing what works and doesn’t work.” Those technologies included experimental bonding techniques and diffusion systems that wirelessly connect Gaga into the stage lighting sequences “and create really dynamic animation,” as Levine notes. “The challenge was that she wants to be able to move,” he continues, “so how can you make featherweight lights? People are all about technology,” he adds, “but to me, a needle is technology—it’s what you do with the needle. Apart from me and my team, no one knew what they were getting,” Levine recalls, “I was basically fitting black jumpsuits on her! But It’s my challenge and my passion to surprise people.”

With barely a month to complete the technically complex commission, the piece was finished at 11:00 p.m. on Christmas Day, driven to Las Vegas, and delivered “literally up to the minute the first show started,” Levine recalls of the nail-biting moment. “We lit her up on Christmas Day,” he notes, “isn’t that hilarious? We were all very happy when we lit the tree!” So was the artist herself, who apparently asked for a round of applause for the designer. “For someone of her caliber who has basically seen and worn everything to say that,” he recalls, “there was something super magical about it. I’m so glad that she and her team chose us to carry out her vision.”