Lady Gaga Brings Back The Bustle Skirt

When Lady Gaga burst on the scene and started raking at our eyes with her wonderful outfits, Lady Gaga quickly established herself as more than just another disposable pop singer. Lady Gaga is a style icon, or she'd at least like to be seen that way, and I see no real reason to disabuse her of the notion. Certainly, when she wears clothes, people notice and write articles about them, and that makes her more of a style icon than say, me. So well done, Lady Gaga.

Watching Lady Gaga is something of a pleasure. Of course, when I say 'watching Lady Gaga', I don't mean something creepy, like observing her with a telescopic lens whilst hanging on the outside of a building pretending to be a window washer, I of course mean 'seeing the pictures taken by paparazzi who were probably hanging on the outside of buildings pretending to be window washers'. Basically, I'm one step shy of being a stalker jerk, and if you read this sort of thing regularly, then so are you.

But we have digressed shamefully, for the point of this piece was intended to be the fact that Lady Gaga wore a short skirt with a bustle. For those of us who aren't entirely familiar with the definition of a bustle, here is one from Wikipedia: A bustle is a type of framework used to expand the fullness or support the drapery of the back of a woman's dress, occurring predominantly in the mid-to-late 19th century. Bustles were worn under the skirt in the back, just below the waist, to keep the skirt from dragging.

Now Lady Gaga's skirt was not long enough, or heavy enough to require a bustle, so we can only assume that she chose to wear one to make some kind of statement. Perhaps it was a 'statement' bustle. There are statement everythings these days, don't you know.

I'm hoping that it was a bid to bring back the fashion that was so popular in the 1800's. We so very rarely see clothing from that period out and about in modern society these days, and I think I will find great support when I say that it is a great pity that we don't. If Lady Gaga manages to do just one thing in her career, and that one thing happens to be bringing back the idea that wearing construction girders about one's midsection is a classy and fashionable thing to do, then I say that her life will not have been wasted. She could spend the rest of her days wallowing in ice cream and cartoons and still have left the world a better place than she found it.