Unmasking Mayhem in Five Acts: Lady Gaga’s Coachella

Lady Gaga at Coachella 2025

People are still not over Lady Gaga’s Coachella main stage performance—and with reason. Her performance will be remembered for years to come because she not only outdid herself compared to her Coachella performance in 2017, but brought something that will be marked in every music book, art book, and fashion book for decades. Everything was curated in the most meticulous way possible—nothing was left to chance. The stage, choreography, lighting, makeup, hair, costumes (even those of her dancers), sound, and especially the concept, all worked in harmony. And what was the concept? It was an introspective journey into Gaga’s career and psyche. A walk through memory, trauma, love, and rebirth.

She often says that only “her little monsters” truly understand her. As a little monster myself, I believe that’s absolutely true. Lady Gaga has carried almost three generations for years—many of us quite literally grew up with her. Not just her music, but with her evolving concept of art. Because Gaga cannot be boxed into the label of a “pop star”. She’s something else entirely: a performance artist, a storyteller, a living archive.

Act I - The Performance as Opera

Gaga’s decision to structure her Coachella 2025 set into five acts, like a classical opera, was a statement in itself. She delivered (and served) not just a concert, but a narrative, a dramaturgy of her own life and artistic evolution. Few seem to remember that Lady Gaga is classically trained—and that fact was at the heart of this decision. That’s what makes her feel so whole as an artist—every element is deliberate.

Think of her as a modern-day Mozart-meets-Gluck with a soft touch of Maria Callas. She has Mozart’s prodigy-level technical skill and versatility, Gluck’s emotional storytelling instincts, and Callas’ unparalleled stage presence. Also, Gaga doesn’t just get out there to sing, she embodies and transforms. She directed her Coachella audience through an emotional and symbolic terrain, and this five-act structure allowed her to do just that—with rising tension, transformation, and emotional release.

If she had been born in the 1700s, she’d have been writing operas that scandalized and enlightened audiences in equal measure. She’d be revolutionary, both admired and criticized, probably banned in a few cities—and then ultimately remembered as a genius who changed the face of music and performance just like she’s doing it today. 

Act II - Gaga and her Language of Fashion

But what makes her legacy even more indelible is how she’s always used fashion as a language—a medium as vital to her storytelling as her vocals or choreography. Gaga inhabits the clothes she wears, reason why through the years she’s built an archive of looks that could very well one day go into a full museum exhibition. Her Coachella looks were a living gallery of a runway memory of rebellion and resurrection.

When we talk about “fashion moments” in pop culture, Gaga sets the bar because she has shown through her performance that she has built fashion eras. There was a clear reference to Alexander McQueen’s Spring/Summer 2005 chessboard in her Poker Face performance. McQueen’s original chessboard runway stage, “It’s only a game”, was a cultural statement about the challenges of womanhood and how women are placed in power positions only for strategy. Gaga used this reference as a metaphor for the way she has navigated fame and power in the music industry. She embraced the duality of both being a player and a piece, reflecting on the game she has been forced to play in the public eye. 

Singing “Poker Face” during this part of her performance represented the mask that concealed her true feelings, much like the strategic moves on a chessboard. What is more, she also confronted the version of herself she had long ago constructed—the blonde, crowned icon of Bad Romance fame—a persona that came to embody her public identity, but one that she now seems to distance herself from during Mayhem. By juxtaposing her current self with this earlier, more controlled version, Gaga subtly critiques the power dynamics of fame while reclaiming ownership over her own image and narrative. In addition to that, she also re-referenced her Mugler look from her Paparazzi video, which again, talked about the constraints of facing fame and the fact that she needed to face it as if she was wearing armor, no matter how weak she felt. Both of these moments were powerful moments of self-reflection through fashion, showing how she has evolved beyond the persona she created, stepping away from the rules of the game into her own, unshackled and free identity. 

Alexander McQueen Spring 2005 Runway Show: “It’s Only a Game”

After understanding thispart, it later on at the end of the show made a lot of sense to see her wearing Matieres Fecal custom look with wings, and the fact that she closed the show wearing that look and singing “Bad Romance” was a confirmation that she has rewritten her whole narrative, one that has become a manifesto of her true self, a Lady Gaga that no longer conforms (coincidently the brand who made the look has the innate vision of its creators to “never conform and always provoke”) and that she is now completely free to be the only one who decides how her narrative is going to go—again, such a a powerful moment of self-reflection!

For Gaga, fashion is never an accessory. It’s a thesis. And this performance was a dissertation in how to dress the soul.

Act III – A Walk Through Memory, “Religion” and Mayhem

If Gaga’s stage was a cathedral, then Mayhem was the sermon. The new album, which was released just a month before Coachella (I know, it seems longer because we’ve already listened to it a thousand times nonstop), became the emotional backbone of the entire set. The lyrics of Mayhem interrogate inner chaos, survival and joy through the lens of rage and reinvention. If you want to know why Mayhem might be one of her best (if not the best) album she’s ever made it is because it is both confessional (church pun intended) and confrontational. 

This is when we have to talk about the stage visuals, because they all reflected this. At times they were abstract and dreamlike—like when she sang “Die With a Smile” and we got to see Gaga’s romantic side and suddenly the stage got bright— and at others jarring and hyperreal—when she finally noticed the “demons” that were looking down on her from the cathedral’s window and suddenly started judging her to the point she had to run away and “the red woman” came out to look for her. This turned her performance into a kind of live-action memory theater, we saw Gaga perform through herself.

Each act peeled back a layer. The past was not only revisited, but reworked. Songs like “Bloody Mary” and “Judas” were reborn and connected to “Abracadabra” and “Garden of Eden” as if they came from the same narrative, a religious iconography was now juxtaposed with a more mature, almost mystical Gaga—less pop provocateur, more high priestess of pain and transcendence. 

Act IV – Vulnerability vs. Performance

Now what sets Gaga apart from other artists is most likely her radical vulnerability, a very uncommon feature for someone who is labeled as a “pop star”---again, she’s not, let’s reiterate she’s far more complex than that. She allows herself to be seen—raw, weird, glorious, weeping, laughing. At Coachella, she talked in-between songs, where she slightly let out her vulnerable self to explain the meaning of each song. When she said before playing “Shallow” that “she had the chance to say something she’s never said before when she sang it” and “let’s get away from the shallow”, this was also another moment in which she let her vulnerable self co-exist with all the fame and attention that surrounded her. 

After this song, she surprised everyone by singing “Vanish Into You” and going down the stage to literally “vanish” into her little monsters, where, by chance, somebody handed her a bouquet of black flowers, which was probably one of the most surreal moments of the performance, because it all fit perfectly. It was a moment when, even when her audience was enormous, there was still a clear communication between her performance self and them, which makes everything even more singular because that bouquet meant that only her fans understood her and knew exactly what she was trying to narrate. It’s very hard that moments like this happen, when the narrator finally gets a response from the public. It kind of reminded me of the book by Italo Calvino named “If on a Winter's Night a Traveler”, where at some point, the protagonist and narrator of the story (Gaga) becomes self-aware that the reader is involved in the story and starts acknowledging it more often, breaking character. 

This is where her artistry becomes catharsis. Her spectacle isn’t in the fireworks or lasers (the fireworks were only released in the end)—it’s in the bare, beating heart she brings to the stage. Gaga’s greatest power isn’t reinvention like many seem to say. It’s transparency. And in a culture obsessed with perfection, she dares to be incomplete, which translates into feeding a culture that becomes whole by getting in touch with her art.

Act V – Gaga’s Legacy, Reaffirmed

Lady Gaga’s Coachella performance was a thesis on her life’s work. It fused music, fashion, theater, and myth into a singular vision of what performance can be. With Mayhem all out in the open, she reminded us that she’s not here to fit into the music industry’s mold again—she’s here to obliterate it. And in doing so, she’s set a new bar for what it means to be a live performer in the 21st century (let’s just say that the bar is very high once again after so many years). 

Gaga is a true storyteller capable of creating worlds where art is total, fashion is narrative, and the stage is a place to heal, rage, and be reborn. Her legacy isn’t built on perfection but on her willingness to show the world her true self, flaws and all. Through her art, she’s set a new standard for live performances—one that asks the audience to engage, reflect, and feel alongside her.

Lady Gaga closing look wearing Matières Fécales custom look