Yesterday, Lady Gaga “walked” the runway for the Mugler show in Paris. Gaga has associated herself closely with Thierry Mugler (who rebranded his line to simply “Mugler”) this year, even letting Mugler use the first remix of “Born This Way” for a runway show a few months ago. The above image is Gaga’s entrance on the catwalk, and afterwards, she changed into a sheer, printed catsuit that I’m kind of loving:

Disregard the eye makeup for a second, and just judge the catsuit on its merits: adorable, right? And well suited for Gaga. She needs to go back to “playful” rather than “I’m so coked out of my skull that everything is super-serious and humorless.” The NYT had more about Gaga’s runway appearance:

With ear-high eyeliner and feather “horns” in their hair, the models at the Mugler show were vamping and camping it up on a set with soaring arches like a Gothic cathedral. But however much they swayed their narrow hips in filmy tight-stretch dresses and risked falling off their brutally high heels, there was no contest — not even from the head-to-toe-tatooed male model on the runway.

All were upstaged by Lady Gaga, the great performing artist of the 21st century, who was clearly Born This Way — ready for her close-up in Paris.

“Mugler was and is my lifestyle,” the singer said backstage, referring to the hard, sci-fi glamour of her latest album. For that, and for her jaw-dropping appearance on an MTV awards show wearing slabs of raw red meat, her stylist and collaborator is Nicola Formichetti — now designer for the Mugler label, relaunched in the spirit of its great fashion moment in the 1980s.

Gaga was wearing a semi-transparent animal print body suit with shoes 61 centimeters, or 24 inches, high — except the footwear was elevated without a heel. On the runway earlier, she had switched from a black sheer-and-shine form-fitting dress (somewhat obscured by the arty lighting and the curling smoke of her cigarette) to a full-on Hello! Madonna corset dress with a coolie hard hat.

But did those outfits, from a designer with a Japanese-Italian background and a high-flying career in magazine styling, really make their mark on fashion?

The show opened with the Mugler message of big shoulders, sculpted in the round, but soon the jacket fronts were scooped out on one side to reveal a latex bra and most of one breast. Semi-nudity, a visible bra, corsets and clingy, shiny sex-shop skirts are not exactly new to fashion. But the show had an unbridled energy.

And, as Mr. Formichetti put it: “I just wanted to bring the fun back. It’s not so much about the clothes.”

[From The New York Times]

What kind of crap is “It’s not so much about the clothes” coming from a fashion designer? It’s like saying, “Eh, we just wanted to get some attention, we’re not expecting to sell any of this crap.” But they should try to see the catsuit – it won’t be flattering on many women, but I think there are a lot of drag queens who will be ordering it.

Photos courtesy of Fame.