‘Engineering feat’: 26-year-old Australian creates Lady Gaga costumes | Australian fashion

IIt begins with a flood of red: a stage with red curtains and flashing red lights. It’s Lady Gaga, so theatrics are par for the course. As the lights rise, it becomes clear that she is not standing on a giant stage, but is actually wearing one.

The military chest extends to the velvet curtains, which are 7.5 meters high. dress. “It’s not just a dress; it’s a moving piece of art, a work of engineering,” says Taiwanese-Australian designer Samuel Lewis, who dreamed up the design and created it in collaboration with Los Angeles-based fashion designer Athena Lawton.

The extent of the costume only becomes clear when Gaga’s skirt opens to reveal a metal cage underneath, beyond which dancers wriggle and reach. Steel bars. Louis had to go above and beyond to dream up this design and make it happen. “We had to wonder, how gigantic could something like this be?”

Five-star Gaga’s return to the OTT camp, the Mayhem Ball Tour, isn’t the first time she and the 26-year-old designer have worked together. Aside from designing all of the looks on the tour’s first act, Lewis dressed her for the 2025 Grammys and for the music videos for Illness (a gray illusion gown made of hand-dyed silk, for a sense of decadence) and Abracadabra (a red boned silk dress that plays into Lewis’ love of corsets).

Since graduating from Florence’s Polimoda University in 2024, Louis has quickly become known among celebrity circles for combining precise geometry with a kind of anarchic romanticism and grunge; A combination that makes his work feel kinetic and disciplined.

He throws himself into complex construction—Russian doll dresses within dresses, flawlessly embellished corsets, pieces that move and fit together and transform into other things. These pieces must function, bear weight, and withstand the effort of being on stage. Designing for beauty is one thing; Designing to survive performance is another thing entirely.

Other celebrities who have taken notice of his work include: Chapel Rowan, BLACKPINK members, Julia Foxx and Madonna. He designs Christina Aguilera’s Christmas looks, too.

Lewis shrugs off the suggestion that he was precociously gifted, preferring instead to talk about his spider web of influences. His cultural diet moves in “waves,” but film is a big part of it. Now he’s hooked on Only Lovers Left Alive, a 2013 film directed by Jim Jarmusch’s Tilda Swinton. About vampires who lived for a very long time, in Tangier and Detroit.

His pieces are heavily inspired by “70s, 80s and 90s rock,” he says, and are often interested in “fabrics that may not be perfect, that have a sense of decadence.” He mixes Debbie Harry with stately Victoriana, gravitating towards silhouettes that follow the shape of the body, then twist to become a touch of fantasy.

“I wasn’t always the best designer, but by striving to become a better designer — watching movies, reading books, listening to music, seeing art — I was able to become better. You need to interact with things to become better, and I’m a firm believer in that.”

Lewis’ personal style also leans toward the sex appeal and fervor of 1970s rock: flares, high collars, and gothic boots. “Putting clothes together is a way to access that design mind, even when I’m not actually designing,” he says. His style may not always be practical: “I’ve been known to wear high heels while out and about.”

Lewis is based in Melbourne, but this year his work has taken him around the world from Los Angeles to Paris, and from Italy to the South Korea. Lewis was born in Australia but speaks with a faint international school accent – ​​a legacy of his father’s embassy work, which took the family to the Philippines, Vietnam, India, New Zealand and Austria during Lewis’s childhood.

His latest appearance at K-pop Rosé’s Supernova performance in Taiwan featured a black and white feather boa, a nod to the stunning tail feathers of the magpie endemic to Taiwan.

This opportunity came about through Instagram. The Internet has succeeded in reducing geographical distance; Most of his first high-profile clients found him online. “With the Internet, you can do this wherever you are,” he says. “I am proof of that.”

But being visible online doesn’t erase the fact that Australian designers are often overlooked until they leave. “Often, attention goes to people who have already proven themselves abroad. We still have this idea of ​​Paris and Milan as the ‘real’ signifiers of fashion. But we don’t focus on what’s happening here. We wait until someone is shown in Paris, and then we say: ‘Oh, now we’re interested.'”

Celebrities also helped shape his career. “The real art in fashion these days is carried by celebrities,” he says. “They are the people who have the kinds of resources that allow for this kind of exploration, allowing you to have wild ideas.”

Now Louis is turning his mind to his first collection, which will be part made-to-order and part ready-to-wear. It will land in the first half of 2026 and will be inspired by “the idea of ​​collecting things across time, of finding beauty in everything without caring too much about what it is and what it represents – but seeing the magic in it anyway.”

Like vampire Tilda Swinton? He agrees, with a caveat: “Less existential.”

His challenge, he says, is relying on the corset and “extreme-looking pieces” he creates for his celebrity clients – without expecting his clients to “sacrifice” their rib cages.

“I really want to make something that makes you wonder: ‘What is this? How does it work?