Dua Lipa Covers Vanity Fair; Discusses Her Bicontinental Relationship, Overcoming Self Doubt, World Domination, and What’s Next
In a new cover story for Vanity Fair, Grammy winner Dua Lipa speaks with staff writer Erin Vanderhooof about overcoming self doubt, and reaching new levels of stardom while the world was shut down.The 25-year-old also opens up about her relationship with Anwar Hadid, and where her career is headed next.
Future Nostalgia, a dance record begging to be heard in the common space of the club, thrived amid quarantine to score a Grammy for best pop vocal album and unleash an extraordinary run of Top 40 singles. Something about Future Nostalgia seemed tailor-made for a moment when traditional sources of fun have shut down but you still need joy as a lifeline.
“There was just this pressure,” Lipa says. “People just telling me that I wasn’t good enough or that I wasn’t deserving of it or whatever it was…. I was like, ‘All right, I’m just going to shut everything out. And I’m going to make sure that I get this album the way that I want it to. And I’m really just going to focus on being great at everything that I do.’ ”
In March 2020 Lipa was on her way back to London from promoting the album in Australia. Her return, it turns out, was a harbinger of the year to come: “I opened the front door to my house and all of a sudden, I can hear this water trickling…. And my whole apartment, it had flooded!”
So when she performed “Don’t Start Now” on March 30 on James Corden’s late-night show, she was doing it from an Airbnb. The Zoom call–esque production, which featured Lipa accompanied by her band and dancers in separate video squares, was a hit in those early quarantine days when late-night TV, and the rest of the world, was still on its heels.
“It was a really small, little studio flat,” she says. “I was balancing my iPhone on my laptop, using the little oven lights from behind to give me some ambience.”
Outside of work, Lipa’s quarantine was a peaceful escape with Anwar Hadid, whom Lipa began seeing in June 2019. The couple indulged in a love of the card game Uno, did some painting, and enjoyed the unseasonably pleasant English springtime.
“Anwar is half Dutch, so he’s also quite European in some senses,” she says. In keeping with her general policy for posting on social media, she asks Hadid before sharing any photos of him, though she isn’t necessarily upset if he doesn’t do the same. “I always like to ask if he likes a picture before I post it. But I also think sometimes it’s sweet that he really likes kind of ugly pictures of me,” she says. “And I look at him, I’m like, ‘Really?’ And he’s like, ‘I love it.’ And then I let him post it, although I hate it.
Those who watch Lipa closely will have noticed her full-throated support for Black Lives Matter, her enthusiasm for voting Labour in 2019, and her persistence in celebrating her Albanian identity despite occasional negative reactions to the symbology she’s used to express it. It’s in part a matter of using the platform she regards as a privilege: “As my profile is growing, especially online, I feel like I need to use that to do something better than, you know, posting cute pictures or whatever.”
Back in 2018, after Lipa became the most streamed female artist in the UK, and reached number six on the Hot 100, a few backhanded YouTube comments and awkward performance clips became memes that had unusual staying power, even if their implication was a bit inscrutable. One of the most lasting ones—“go girl give us nothing,” on a video of her performing at the 2018 Brit Awards.
Lipa reflects on what she saw as her own shortcomings in the period as her popularity ramped up and her schedule was stuffed.
“It’s one thing when people are mean about you, but you know that you did your best,” she says. “But it’s another thing when people are mean about you and you know that you actually haven’t had the opportunity to be the best because you’ve spread yourself so thinly in trying to do everything at once.”
“You want to show that you’re here to stay and you want to show that it’s not just about one album or one big song or whatever it is,” she continues. “I just wanted to make sure that this time around, I was very much in control of the fact that I’m going to do the music, then I’m going to rehearse. And then when I come in and I do the performances, they’re all going to be amazing. I’m going to prove to people that I can do this and that I’m here to stay.”
While Lipa’s ongoing project of world domination is still unfolding, her aims for the near term are slightly more concrete: two more albums and tours over the next few years. Lipa brought up acting or wine making as things she might one day try but emphasized that the music remains her focus. “I want to solidify myself as an artist in that aspect first, before anything else,” she said. “For now, I just wanna make sure the music is good.”
*Read “How Dua Lipa Shut Down the Trolls and Conquered International Pop” by Erin Vanderhoof in Vanity Fair’s July/August issue and on VanityFair.com
Image Credits Venetia Scott/VanityFair
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Dr. Jerry Doby Editor-in-Chief of The Hype Magazine, Media and SEO Consultant, Journalist, Ph.D. and retired combat vet. 2023 recipient of The President's Lifetime Achievement Award. Partner at THM Media Group. Member of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, the United States Press Agency and ForbesBLK.
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