Dua Lipa features on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar US: The Icons Issue for September. She was photographed byAnthony Seklaoui. Dua opens up about making unabashedly romantic music in a world where it often feels like romance has gone out of style. Click here to read the interview on harpersbazaar.com, otherwise check it out below.
It’s a beautiful spring afternoon in Munich, and the city’s squares are full of bleary-eyed people, still celebrating. Scattered around park benches are the last few empties, the universal symbol of a memorable night. It feels as if the whole city is in a moment of afterglow from the night before, when Paris Saint-Germain defeated Inter Milan to win its first Champions League final and Dua Lipa played to an arena of more than 15,000 screaming fans.
I’d arrived in Munich 24 hours earlier, on a red-eye from Boston. I shuffled through customs at 7:00 a.m. and approached the weary-looking border agent slumped forward in his chair. “Purpose for visit?” he asked. I panicked, in the flush of sleep, and could muster only “Dua Lipa?” “Ah,” the agent said, leaning forward. “Of course, the Dua Lipa.” He waved me through.
It makes sense that Dua Lipa’s name is one that’s able to dissolve a border. Her 2020 album, Future Nostalgia, was a global smash—a top-10 hit in more than 30 countries. It was released just as many nations were declaring quarantines during the onset of the pandemic, and its singles dominated the global pop landscape for that strange and destabilizing time. The biggest one, “Levitating,” was decreed this year by Billboard to be the top song by a female solo artist of the 21st century. Songs like “Don’t Start Now” and “Break My Heart” were big, eloquent love letters to the transformative power of dance music—and, in that time, served as reminders of a better, freer world, the one we were hopefully all saving ourselves for.
Last night, it seemed briefly that that world had arrived. I saw Dua Lipa, now 30, dance in a ring of fire in a white lace slipdress, sing atop a giant structural wave, and soar above the crowd in a long white fluffy coat, commanding her fans with a flick of the wrist. Lipa is currently on a world tour in support of her latest album, Radical Optimism. Her stage persona is a mix of pop goddess and relatable queen. It’s a cliché, but many times when I watched her perform, it was easy to forget we were in a former Olympic stadium. Sometimes I would have to turn around to remind myself of the thousands of people sitting in rows behind me.
“She’s made for the stage. She has this incredible talent to connect with her audience,” director Pedro Almodóvar, Lipa’s friend, tells me. “Beauty always surprises me, but hers is special. She is very alive. She is contagious. She can make a whole auditorium dance as if it was a club, with that very peculiar hoarse tone of hers, which I love.”
Ifirst meet Lipa around 40 minutes before she’s set to perform at Munich’s Olympic Hall, in her dressing room backstage. For someone about to play to a crowd of thousands, she’s preternaturally calm. It is hard to believe her when she tells me later, “When the show first starts, I’m pretty nervous.”
Wearing a pink spaghetti-strap tank top and matching yoga pants, she’s just finished rehearsing the local cover song she will perform tonight. On every tour stop, Lipa picks a beloved local song to cover. Tonight, she’ll perform Alphaville’s “Forever Young.” (The crowd will go wild.) Right now, she’s gushing because in Prague a few nights before, she learned a song by a Polish-Czech artist, Ewa Farna, and performed it with her in perfect Czech. The song, “Na ostří nože,” went to number one on Spotify in the Czech Republic the next day. “There’s a moment where I go out into the crowd,” Lipa says, “and that part of me is not the same person that I am when I’m just, like, singing and performing and dancing. When I’m singing the songs, I feel really powerful. The rooms get bigger. I want to make big spaces feel small.”
It’s an emblematic story about Lipa and her brand of pop: generous and big-hearted, compassionate and without pretense. The pop landscape is currently dominated by fandoms obsessed with Easter eggs and hidden messages. There’s a school of pop stardom that encourages work that is endlessly self-referential: You need to know the artist’s “lore” to understand a song fully. Then there’s the strain that’s dripping in irony. Lipa’s work, and what she puts out in the world, doesn’t operate like that. Her songs are less self-regarding cryptograms and more stand-alone constructions. Her presentation is sparkly yet sincere.
The life she showcases on social media—photo dumps of beach vacations around the world, sumptuous plates of food, icy martinis, embraces with her fiancé, the British actor Callum Turner—has led to fans good-naturedly ribbing her as the girl on endless vacation. She is, of course, working: more than 80 tour dates, in 41 cities across the world, from Kuala Lumpur to Dallas. Instead of a girl on eternal holiday, you could see Lipa’s bon-vivant social footprint as evidence of a hard-won determination to enjoy the life she’s created for herself. Lipa tells me that according to her astrologer, “the planets are kind of crazy now, with Saturn’s influence making the world more negative-leaning. You really have to be intentional about what you create,” she says. “You’ve got to fucking keep on the straight line and do something positive.”
The next day, I meet Lipa at her hotel in Old Town Munich. Apart from two security guards, we have the room—an expansive marble-floored chamber with soaring ceilings and high windows that overlook an internal courtyard—to ourselves. She is dressed in a black Calvin Klein top, a skirt over trousers from the independent Lithuanian brand Urte Kat, Gucci pumps, and a trench coat from the Row. It’s an ensemble that manages to look at once thrown on and impossibly chic. It’s easy to see why Lipa’s outfits are so breathlessly documented, fawned over, and replicated and why the fashion industry is so smitten. She has fronted campaigns for Versace, Puma, YSL Beauty, and, most recently, Chanel.
Lipa plunks her Chanel 25 bag unceremoniously on the table beside us (she’s one of the faces of the handbag campaign) and takes a seat, tucking her feet underneath her. The world Lipa released Radical Optimism into is drastically different than the world that received Future Nostalgia. How does she respond to that as an artist? “For me, it’s being patient with myself,” she says. “Doing things that feel fun and natural to me and then also just doing things that I’m proud of.”
Part of that pride comes from her other job, the one she’s doing when she’s not touring the world. Lipa heads up Service95, a “cultural concierge” service, as she calls it, that includes a website, newsletters, a book club, and a podcast that reflect Lipa’s desire to “broaden my horizons and not get things just from a Western standpoint all the time—get all the interesting things that I find inspiring” and bring those things to her community. She has interviewed everyone from Patti Smith to Apple CEO Tim Cook to writer Ocean Vuong to Almodóvar. (That’s how they became friends.) Her questions are wide-ranging, rigorously researched, deeply empathetic, and never softball. (“My new iPhone 15—can you guarantee that the cobalt that’s in that phone has not been mined using child labor in the DRC?” she asked Cook.)
When I ask Lipa a question, she tilts her head and leans forward. It’s a pose that suggests both ease and interest. I register the move as one of a practiced interviewer, a game-recognizes-game moment. Only, with Lipa, there’s an emotional directness in her conversation that can be disarming. There’s no subtext in her conversation or presentation, only text.
“I have this firm belief that whatever I write comes true,” she tells me. “So I’m always very, very cautious about the things that I write. I’m not trying to put some crazy energy into the world. I’m trying to just be light and have fun and share my experiences.”
I mention that the American novelist Alexander Chee tells his students that they can write whatever they wish as fiction, but whatever they are exploring tends to come back to them, to reverberate in their own lives.
“Once I put something out into the world, it no longer belongs to me,” she says. More than once in our conversation, she refers to herself as a “chronic overthinker,” and the idea of artistic release seems to be one that gives her the confidence to act as an artist. “You make the thing that you love; you make the thing that you’re passionate about and you’re proud of,” she says forcefully. Often, when she’s saying something heartfelt, she glances away. “You put it out in the world and you have to put your hands up. The people choose. We don’t get to choose.”
Perhaps it is Lipa’s chronic overthinking that allows her to convincingly sing lines like “Are you someone that I can give my heart to? / Or just the poison that I’m drawn to? / It can be hard to tell the difference late at night,” as she does in her single “Training Season.” But she knows how to get out of her own way too. She tells me she goes for a drink and a dance when she hits a creative roadblock.
Lipa’s joie de vivre makes sense, given her background. She is the eldest child of Kosovar-Albanian immigrants who fled their home in the former Yugoslavia, hoping to escape the escalating conflict and violence there. Lipa was born in London in 1995 and lived there until the age of 11, when her parents returned to Kosovo shortly before the country declared independence in 2008. Artists born of family stories marred by conflict and violence often make the choice to vigorously, courageously pursue the act of living joyfully.
Lipa, who began taking singing lessons at the age of nine, returned to London on her own at 15, living with a family friend as she pursued a career in music. It was a huge risk but one that made sense for a girl who knew exactly what she wanted to do with her life. She hustled for work, uploading videos of herself singing covers, modeling, and auditioning. A digital native, she kept a blog, Dua Daily, chronicling her life. Throughout, she maintained a strong connection to her family. When we met briefly before her first show in her dressing room, she offhandedly mentioned a group family dinner she planned during her Amsterdam tour stop that included cousins, aunts, and uncles.
Many of the focuses of her creative work can be traced to that earlier life. Her interest in literature and authors came, in part, from her family’s love of books. Her paternal grandfather was a well-known historian in Kosovo, and her parents instilled a love of reading. “It was such a big part of my childhood,” she says. “There was a big bookshop. It was at the O2 Centre on Finchley Road in London, and there was a kids’ section.” On weekends, Lipa’s mother would “sit there reading her books, and I would just spend all day in there reading my books. I think books allow us to slow down a little bit,” she says.
Lipa tells me of visiting a book club at a women’s prison in the United Kingdom as a guest of the Booker Prize Foundation’s Books Unlocked program. The club was discussing Shuggie Bain, which was also the first monthly selection for Lipa’s own book club. The novel is a rendering of growing up working-class in Scotland—brutal and gorgeous all at once. “There was also one lady in there that I think about often, and she was about 52 years old or something, and she said, ‘Oh, had I maybe read books sooner in my life, maybe I wouldn’t be here, because reading books has really made me understand people and humans and emotions.’ Reading opens you up to the world. And it makes the world so much smaller.”
Pop music operates similarly. At its best, it manages to make you feel as if the song that everyone is singing was somehow also written just for you. It takes the deeply personal feelings of love, joy, and heartbreak and reminds the listener that these emotions are universal, felt by both the international pop star and the listener who catches the signal in passing.
“Dua is good for the ecosystem,” says her friend Mustafa, the poet and singer-songwriter. “Consider pop music as a tent,” he says. “She’s walking us in, and she’s using that tent to nourish us. She wants to have the conversation through her curiosity.”
The novelist Min Jin Lee, who met Lipa when she was interviewed on the Service95 podcast, feels similarly. “I’m 56, so I see a lot of young people in the world, and I want them to have an experience of culture in which there are people making music that makes them feel good.” Lee takes this charge seriously. In addition to her novels, she regularly hosts authors and artists for dinners at her home to bring together disparate creative people. “There are very deleterious, very harmful aspects of our popular culture right now,” Lee says, “and I think Dua is approaching things in a very intellectual, very philosophical way. At the same time, she can be very glamorous and pretty and aspirational as well.”
There is a famous adage of novelists, “Happiness writes white,” meaning that it’s more difficult to articulate joy and love in meaningful ways than it is to write something devastating or depressing. But when Lipa writes about love as an artist, she says with a smile, “you get to decide what’s shared and what’s not. I think that gives me comfort.”
It was through Mustafa that Lipa connected with Callum Turner, to whom she is now engaged. “I love love. It is a beautiful thing,” Lipa tells me. There’s that directness again. “It’s a really inspiring thing. You find yourself so intensely falling all the time in the best way possible.” She’s looking off into the distance, the universal gesture of a lover talking about her beloved. “That vulnerability is so scary, but I feel so lucky to get to feel it. I’ve spent a lot of time being guarded or protecting my heart, and so I’m letting go of that feeling and just being like, ‘Okay, if I’m supposed to get hurt, then this is what’s going to happen.’ I have to just allow love.” I ask how it feels to be speaking so candidly about her relationship. “I’m happier than ever, so it feels like I’m doing a disservice by not talking about it. … When you’re a public person, anything that’s very personal is very vulnerable. It’s not like I don’t want to share it.”
Mustafa tells me a story about the “relentless consideration and care” Lipa has shown him, noting that “there’s a perfect parallel between how she deals with me personally and how she deals with the community publicly.” In 2023, Mustafa’s brother was killed by gun violence in Toronto. Mustafa went into deep mourning, retreating to Berlin. “Dua reached out to me constantly,” he says. He’s speaking to me from a busy corner in SoHo on a sunny New York day, a place so far from sorrow that it makes his words more poignant. “Mourning is a life sentence. A lot of times, someone can’t embark on that life sentence with you, and so you have to have mercy on the people in your life. But I just wasn’t prepared for that kind of endurance.”
Lipa possesses something that is increasingly rare in the entertainment space: a unique voice, both literally, in terms of its tone, and metaphorically, in terms of her art. “It’s just undeniable. She just has a God-given thing,” says producer Mark Ronson, who worked with Lipa on the hit “Dance the Night” from last year’s Barbie movie.
A few months ago, Ronson and Lipa were recording new material at a studio in New York. “We’ve been making music together for eight years now,” he says, “and she was singing this song. It’s a beautiful lyric about her relationship, and I just said to her, ‘I know this sounds really corny: I feel like I’m watching you now as a woman deliver these new songs and this vocal.’ She was always mature and grown-up, because of the way she grew up so fast. She always had her shit together. But who she’s become now … this is a new era for her as a songwriter and as a singer and as a human.”
“Sometimes overthinking is a gift,” Lipa says. She’s talking about her next album—new music that she’s thinking about even in the midst of her tour. “Every day I’m making something that sounds completely different from yesterday. Trying to figure out the new direction is probably the most fun part, but it’s also the hardest.”
Photoshoots » 2025 » Harper’s Bazaar US by Anthony Seklaoui
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