Ms. Bright Side

For Dua Lipa, queen of the dance floor and everyone's big sister, life is only worth living if you're having fun.

- Suzy Exposito

The first time Dua Lipa went clubbing, she was just a wisp of a tween girl in Kosovo. The UK-born pop star realizes how absurd it sounds as she explains it. Seated in her home office in London, flanked by shelves teeming with books, she thumbs through her phone for a blurry image of a photo from that fateful night-as if to prove to the two of us that it did indeed happen. At the center of the photo is a young Lipa dressed in white crochet, smiling brightly next to her much taller cousin and an entourage of stylish women.

Clubbing is a Lipa family tradition; it's also why she wasn't fazed when, while out one night on New York City's Lower East Side with Charli XCX, she ran into her parents partying at The Box. "We celebrate everything and anything, and we just love a party," she explains. "When I go to my aunt's house, it all starts off pretty tame.....Then the music comes on, and we're all dancing in the house. And that's a Tuesday!"

Now 28, Lipa has since made a name for herself as Britain's leading lady of disco. On the dance floor, she plays an almighty oracle, a savvy young agony aunt for lovelorn club kids, desperate for the sobering real talk she's dispensed in hits like "New Rules" and "Don't Start Now."

But long before she penned feminist electro-pop smashes that now stream by the billions, her family knew her as just Dua, their precocious eldest daughter who left Kosovo as a teen to fulfill her pop star dreams by herself in London. That's when she fully harnessed what she calls her "big sister energy" in her life and music; one can hear it now in the unshakable authority with which she sings her songs.

"She is such a big sister," says songwriter Caroline Ailin, who first recognized Lipa's insightful nature when they met almost a decade ago. "You process your feelings [with her], but you also walk away feeling empowered."