For Dua Lipa, Just Being a Pop Star Isn’t Enough

LET’S GET THIS out of the way: Dua Lipa is finishing her third album. It’s due for release in 2024 and, despite the trend of musicians announcing and delaying records for years, Lipa will almost certainly meet her deadline. It’s funny to think of a pop star — or any successful young artist — as just another striving professional. But at 27, Lipa has already become the kind of multihyphenate entrepreneur who not only finishes her assignments on time but discusses strategy and efficiency with the clarity of a company founder delivering a TED Talk. “If I wasn’t as organized as I am, I would be a mess right now,” she says when we meet one drizzly May afternoon in London. The singer had asked one of her favorite restaurants, Sushi on Jones, hidden on the second floor of a King’s Cross concert venue, to open before dinner so we could have the place to ourselves, then arrived 10 minutes early to make sure everything was as planned.

A lot happened in March 2020, so you probably won’t recall that Lipa’s second album, “Future Nostalgia,” leaked at the beginning of the lockdowns, denying her the precise rollout she’d spent many months finessing, postponing her international tour . . . and unintentionally cementing her as the leading pop star of the pandemic. Her barrage of shimmery singles — music for “dance crying,” as she describes it — later established her as the only female artist with two albums that have surpassed 10 billion streams on Spotify.

The next record will still be pop, she says, lest her “fans have a meltdown.” She doesn’t want to “alienate” them, although she’s developing a new sound that may be informed less by the house and disco beats beneath songs like “Physical” and “Hallucinate” than by 1970s-era psychedelia. She’s working with a smaller group of songwriting collaborators, supposedly including Kevin Parker of the Australian psych-rock band Tame Impala, a rumor she all but confirms by denying: “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says, then looks away and laughs a little. Lipa’s dressed — almost studiously — in pop star-off-duty drag: Ugg slip-ons, baggy white jeans, an old Elton John T-shirt, a few diamond-encrusted hoops in each ear.

She can come across as guarded, a little aloof, cool but not necessarily cold, which could be the way she’s been her whole life — or the result of having become globally famous during a period of deep isolation. She lacks the impulse, so common among people her age, to make unnecessary small talk or feign friendliness in order to appear likable. Instead, she remains assiduously on message, implying several times that she feels that journalists are usually trying to trap her or tease out information before she’s ready to share it. “Especially being in the public eye, someone’s always waiting for you to trip or fail or whatever,” she tells me. During our meal, which was arranged to last 90 minutes and ends exactly on time, “whatever” is one of the words she uses most, in a way that makes her sound wary of having to narrativize her own life.

But she’s particularly taciturn about the forthcoming album because it’s still in development — a process that’s “insular and exciting,” she says, even if “you have no idea what the reaction is going to be once it’s out, so there’s this nervous feeling” — but also because there’s so much else she prepared to discuss today: not herself, not the music, but the other elements comprising Lipa’s unusual plan for longevity, something she’s been working toward since she was 5, when she used to lead her classmates in schoolyard dance routines.

AFTER HER TOUR concluded last November, Lipa arrived in London and began focusing on several non-music projects, as well as cooking and relaxing in the house she’s renovating in North London, near where she was raised by a pair of Albanian immigrants, Dukagjin and Anesa Lipa. They’d fled Kosovo in 1992, during the conflicts in the region, then eventually returned to Pristina, the capital; four years after that, they let their eldest daughter (Dua, whose name means “love” in Albanian) move back to England by herself when she was 15, where she briefly modeled and began to pursue music: Two years later, after appearing in a 2013 commercial for “The X Factor,” she signed with Ben Mawson, Lana Del Rey’s manager.

Here in London — where her parents, younger brother (Gjin, 17) and sister (Rina, 22, an up-and-coming model) also live again — she enjoys eating vegetable samosas at Gymkhana and drinking orange wine at Westerns Laundry. Among her friends, who predate her fame and, she says, “ignore me in my own kitchen,” she’s the one who plans birthday dinners and trips. Many of these restaurants and destinations end up in Service95, the arts and culture newsletter she launched in February of last year after wanting a place to write about the bakeries, bookstores and other venues she’d been keeping lists of since she was a teenager.

On the Covers

She’s currently recording a third season of her podcast, “Dua Lipa: At Your Service,” an accompaniment to Service95, for which Lipa interviews fellow artists like the singer Billie Eilish and the actor Dan Levy; queer activists like Brandon Wolf, who fights for gun reform after having survived the 2016 shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla.; and writers like Min Jin Lee and Esther Perel (as well as Hanya Yanagihara, this magazine’s editor in chief). She finishes each conversation by asking for a list of recommendations, whether that’s Los Angeles restaurants (Levy) or activists to follow (Wolf); her hope, she says, is to be of service to her readers and listeners, many of whom were likely born around 1995, when she was, hence the name. Earlier this summer, she created a Service95 book club; Douglas Stuart’s “Shuggie Bain” (2020), a gay coming-of-age story set in working-class Glasgow, was her first pick. Lipa also released a fashion collection that she co-designed with Donatella Versace, full of butterfly-print bikinis and floral stretch dresses. Its theme was La Vacanza, Italian for “vacation,” mirroring Lipa’s dominant, if slightly ironic, aesthetic on Instagram, where it looks like all she ever does is relax by a pool.

Not long after, she’d appear as a mermaid in Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” a fitting acting debut, given that it’s based on a doll who’s a former teenage fashion model and, in a single afternoon, bounces between her many demanding professions. “I don’t even want to show you my phone, because I’m embarrassed about it, but it’s really down to the minute: where I’m going, what I’m doing,” Lipa tells me, then opens her calendar app, frowns and eventually turns the screen in my direction. “Wake up, glam, prep for podcast,” she says, scrolling through a day of appointments. “I have to watch ‘Succession,’ so I’ve got to schedule that,” she adds, pointing at the 7 p.m. slot, which is also when she’ll eat dinner. She even plans her showers, wherever she can fit them in. “For as long as I’m having fun, I’m going to keep making music,” she says. “But why can’t I do other things that I love, too?”

IF THE DREAM of pop stardom is far-fetched for all but a few, the musical aspect of Lipa’s empire is, oddly, the least unique thing about it: With her husky voice and relatably imperfect dance moves, she releases catchy, inspirational who-needs-men anthems in collaboration with some of the world’s greatest audio minds and businesspeople. All of them have chosen to put millions of dollars into manufacturing and promoting her earwormy singles not only because she’s talented and beautiful and has good sonic instincts but also because she is — unlike most of her predecessors and peers — admittedly, almost defiantly, not sloppy. “I’ve probably spent more time waiting for artists to show up in the studio than I have working with artists,” says Mark Ronson, the 47-year-old record producer who has made two singles with Lipa, including “Dance the Night” from this summer. “If she’s two minutes late — literally, if it’s 12:02 — there’s a text: ‘Sorry, running five minutes late.’ That’s not superstar behavior, you know? She still works with the mind-set that she hasn’t [made it] yet.” Lipa’s particularly good at editing, he adds, at tediously working and reworking a chorus or melody. She’s comfortable making decisions quickly and multitasking: Sometimes while she’s onstage doing her choreography, she says, she’s also thinking about what she’s going to eat afterward.

Pop, like all genres of creative expression, is more commercialized than ever. The musicians themselves are making less and less money, and those who grew up listening to artists like Britney Spears, Whitney Houston and Amy Winehouse (whom Lipa’s soulful raspiness sometimes summons) have clearly internalized the tragic lessons of those lives and careers. As women in a field driven by sex appeal — it’s no accident that Lipa announced her book club with some swimsuit selfies — they learn early on that people are constantly trying to use them. The smart ones, then, become alert to opportunities to diversify their portfolios and work their way to a kind of moguldom that outlasts radio trends. They grapple with the fact that popular music is a cat-and-mouse game, in which singers must switch up their sound often (while never straying too far from their original persona); refrain from releasing records too frequently so that their fans don’t get bored; and yet recognize, even then, that the audience and the industry might still discard them once they’re in their 30s.

Rihanna, who hasn’t released an album since 2016, has her multibillion-dollar Fenty Beauty line; Ariana Grande will soon star as Glinda in Universal’s “Wicked” juggernaut. Lipa, who has filed trademarks for merchandise including cosmetics and will appear next year in the spy film “Argylle,” has made inroads in both of those directions; watching her and her cohorts’ shared trajectory, you get the sense that they’re expanding into other realms as early and as widely as they can, in part to guarantee their ubiquity but also to ensure against obsolescence. But with her multipronged pursuits (most of which fall under the banner of Service95, “the ultimate cultural concierge,” according to its tag line), Lipa’s approach is distinct in that she’s leading with ideas and information, not products, curating culture in addition to contributing to it. What began as a minimally designed newsletter created with a few former magazine editors — the issues are free and the first one featured short pieces about South African house music and the Irish disability advocate and writer Sinéad Burke — has since grown to accommodate YouTube cooking videos, live book talks with authors (hosted by Lipa) and reported series dedicated to such topics as men’s mental health and the spiking crisis in London, where young people are unknowingly being drugged by strangers at bars.

Service95 represents who Lipa is “behind closed doors,” she says, a space where discussions around trans liberation are as common as those about jewelry and yoga. Though she’s a young, ambitious millennial, the content reflects the very Gen Z belief that all art and culture must be motivated by social justice and that all artists must talk about their ethics and values (at least those deemed palatably progressive) in all contexts and environments. “My intention is never to be political … but there’s a political bent to my existence,” Lipa says. “The easiest thing you can do is just hide away and not have an opinion about anything.” The singer is nevertheless cautious about how she lets her contributors use this microphone. She knows she’s the one who would face repercussions if a problem arose, so she approves every story herself and leads weekly editorial meetings. If it continues to grow, Service95 might one day replace the glossy, feminist-leaning fashion magazines of the 2000s; right now, it’s reminiscent of the chatty, lo-fi publications that the aughts-era blogger Tavi Gevinson offered young fans with “Rookie” before becoming an actress.

“I think it’s a marketing tool: How confessional can you be?” she says. “I also don’t put so much of my life out there for people to dig into the music in this weird, analytical way.”

Lipa, however, has taken the reverse course: Rather than amassing enough access and power within media to eventually jettison the industry for something more glamorous, she’s using her celebrity to expose her readers to everything she’s witnessing from her perch. “The world is really big, and maybe things don’t get to your [corner], so it’s a way of bringing everything together,” she says. This is a canny strategy, for it implies that Lipa’s a normal woman who just hustled her way into an abnormally charmed life while somehow staying grounded. It also makes her seem generous, despite the occasional tone-deaf moment, as when she wrote last November that she “saves up” to go shopping at Amore, the Tokyo vintage luxury handbag emporium.

Among famous women turned media mavens, a category that has recently grown to include the talk show hosts Drew Barrymore and Kelly Clarkson, Lipa’s closest analog might be Gwyneth Paltrow, although Goop is much larger and more lucrative than Service95. Lipa won’t share audience metrics, but she does plan to bring some readers together at a forthcoming event series that will focus on food, wine and books. (“Like Oprah?” I ask, but she shrugs off the comparison: “We don’t really have Oprah [in London].”) She’s more inspired by Reese Witherspoon, the actress best known for playing Type A go-getters like Tracy Flick in “Election” (1999) who later became one of the first celebrities to launch her own book club, partly to create a pipeline of women-centered stories that her company could option for film and television. Maybe Lipa will do something like that, she tells me, but she hasn’t thought of a model “to base Service95 on, which is cool because then it can be its own thing,” she adds, sounding like the content executive she’s becoming. “I’ve found being in the media this way very encouraging.”

She is, after all, a woman about whom many things have been written who now gets to write the story herself. In the newsletter, this takes the form of a short, paragraph-long editor’s letter. But on the podcast, the third season of which is now running weekly in partnership with the BBC, Lipa’s more present. Before speaking with each of her guests in conversations that can last an hour or longer, she says she does four or five days of research; Lisa Taddeo, a 43-year-old journalist who published the nonfiction sex narrative “Three Women” in 2019, told me the singer was among the most natural interviewers she’s talked to, “impeccably prepared, yet off book in the most conversational way.” What Lipa’s doing is different than journalism, though, if only because, as she admits, she avoids bringing up anything that might make her interviewees uncomfortable. She typically deflects inquiries about herself in favor of gathering advice from her subjects, who seem to open up in these conversations; it’s easy to forget that they’re speaking with another artist rather than any other geekily inquisitive host.

Last September, Monica Lewinsky went on the show, where she discussed the Clinton sex scandal and how she recovered from her despair. She was nearly “publicly humiliated to death,” she says, after which Lipa lets out a heavy sigh. “Something that really struck me was how feminists agonized over you,” Lipa responds. “Whether you were using your own agency. Were you a victim? And I really wonder how this has evolved, and how this experience has defined your own relationship with the feminist movement because, for me, it completely blew me away that feminism then isn’t how we know it now, and maybe abuse of power wasn’t at the top of the list.”

“It was your generation,” Lewinsky later reminds her, “that insisted on re-evaluating my story.” After their conversation, Lipa decided that the interviews in the third season should each be dedicated to a single topic, much like Lewinsky’s was centered on shame and healing. For the first episode, which premiered in June, the singer made what felt like a self-referential gambit: She invited on the English YouTuber Amelia Dimoldenberg, the host of the series “Chicken Shop Date” — in which she awkwardly interviews actresses like Jennifer Lawrence and Keke Palmer in a fast-food restaurant — to discuss “how to grow your empire and build your brand,” as Lipa says in her editor’s note announcing the episode. Dimoldenberg’s advice: “Especially for women … you feel like you have to please everyone, you have to come across a certain type of way where you’re not being a diva,” to which Lipa murmurs in agreement. “Believe in your idea,” Dimoldenberg adds. “That’s the most important thing.”

EVEN IF LIPA can do all of this, the question remains: Why? Obviously, she could fill her days just being a massively successful musician. But a few weeks after our lunch, she tells me over the phone that she would be “doing a disservice” to herself if she weren’t “exploring all the things [she] loved and wanted to share.” It’s similar to other explanations she’s given me: She likes “being thrown into the deep end” and acquiring new skills, above all those that are “aligned” with her “activism and love of reading.” She’s been interested in media since high school, especially after her father got a master’s degree in journalism when he returned to Kosovo. (He became her manager last year after she parted ways with Mawson.) She wants to honor the sacrifices her parents made; these various gigs satisfy “what’s maybe the immigrant mentality … this thing I have in my head where I know that, if I don’t work hard enough, the rug could just be pulled from under my feet.” If the music stops bringing in audiences, maybe these other enterprises will.

She never says that last part; she probably never would. She also doesn’t say what I think is the real answer, which is this: Anyone who works in media can tell you that there’s no better way to lead the conversation without ever having to actually talk about yourself. While Lipa’s editorial initiative may seem like an act of self-exposure, it’s in fact one of self-protection — it allows her to connect regularly with her audience by sharing her favorite Spanish wine, the public art installations she enjoyed visiting in rural Japan, the causes or activists or artists she cares about. Sharing a lifestyle, however, is different than sharing a life.

During the rare instances when she has to address something more intimate, her own outlets are the ideal way to disseminate the message. After DaBaby, a rapper featured on a remix of her song “Levitating,” was videotaped making homophobic comments at a 2021 music festival, Lipa wrote a statement on Instagram, where she has 88.6 million followers, renouncing him and encouraging her fans to fight the stigma around H.I.V./AIDS. That sort of direct communication “was something artists didn’t have before,” she says. “Whatever was said about you in the press, that was it: That’s who you are.”

In 2021, an organization founded by the American Orthodox rabbi Shmuley Boteach ran a full-page ad in The New York Times accusing Lipa of antisemitism after she defended Palestinian human rights. Her representatives asked the paper’s leaders to apologize, but they didn’t. For more than two years, Lipa has turned down all coverage opportunities in The Times. Then she convinced Dean Baquet, the newspaper’s former executive editor, to come on her podcast last December. When she brought up the controversy, he had little to say about the company’s decisions (he still works here), explaining the church-and-state divisions between editorial and advertising departments. To her, the exchange went as anticipated: “It was enough for me to voice it to the guy at the top,” and she could then move on from something that had bothered her for years.

All these decisions are hers to make, of course — she owes the public no more or no less than she chooses. Still, it’s interesting, novel even, to watch a celebrity build a brand off her own interests and obsessions, rather than allow her private life to become an interest and obsession of others. Since the dawn of Madonna, we’ve expected pop stars (and indeed all female artists) to bare all — to reference their mental health struggles (Lady Gaga) or their partners’ cheating scandals (Beyoncé) — only to judge and punish them for doing so. Lipa refuses to engage on that level. Her music, too, avoids the strange dissonance of other female artists (Taylor Swift; Adele) who’ve achieved success by exposing everyday secrets and sadnesses, only to find themselves stuck looping those same narratives now that their lives aren’t so relatable. Lipa won’t sing about those kinds of Easter eggs: “I think it’s a marketing tool: How confessional can you be?” she says. “I also don’t put so much of my life out there for people to dig into the music in this weird, analytical way.”

The next album will be “more personal,” she offers, but that’s not why she’s doing it. Two days before we’d met for sushi, Lipa had been rewatching “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” the 2020 documentary about the Bee Gees, “just bawling my eyes out,” she says, with her boyfriend, Romain Gavras, a 42-year-old French Greek film director. (Tellingly, her relationship with Gavras is the only thing her publicist asked that I not bring up myself.) In the film, someone talks about “music that just makes your body feel good,” she explains. “Those are the songs I get attached to — that’s the kind of feeling I want to convey.” Already, she’s proved herself adept as a singer in conjuring those sorts of sensations. But as she keeps talking, I notice that the ordinary gesture of recommending a film I haven’t seen is making her feel good, too. “You should definitely watch it,” she says, interrupting her thoughts about her own music. “It’s amazing. I cry every time.”

Hair by Rio Sreedharan for the Wall Group. Makeup by Samantha Lau. Set design by Afra Zamara for Second Name. Production: Farago Projects. Manicurist: Michelle Humphrey for LMC Worldwide. Photo assistants: Daniel Rodriguez Serrato, Enzo Farrugia, Hermine Werner. Set designer’s assistants: Tatyana Rutherston, Viola Vitali, Oualid Boudrar. Tailor: Sabrina Gomis Vallée. Stylist’s assistants: Martí Serra, Alexis Landolfi, Anna Castellano