DANCING IN THE DARK

How Dua Lipa ignored the trends, turned herself into a ‘female alpha,’ and became the breakout pop star of the pandemic era by delivering the modern disco classic we didn’t know we needed

- ALEX MORRIS

WE’RE STANDING NEXT TO a 15-ton meteorite when it occurs to Dua Lipa that, for maybe one of the first times in many months, her life is back to an approximation of what it might be in that very moment if the coronavirus pandemic had never happened. That is not to say that her day — which has involved waking up on luxuriant sheets in Manhattan’s Bowery Hotel, wearing a black silk bralette as a bona fide shirt, eating a dessert that looks like a gilded egg atop a nest in a private dining room on the 101st floor of Hudson Yards, doing an interview for the Grammys, and wandering after hours in the American Museum of Natural History, a locale chosen for its tenuous connection to the disco-space vibe of her second album, Future Nostalgia — is normal, per se. But up until about a week ago, she should have been on an eight-month tour to promote Future Nostalgia, which she most certainly was not.

Now, it’s mid-December, a week when the tour would have been over, when life would have gone back to some sort of pop-star version of “normal,” doing the kind of things she’s done today, even if she’s currently doing them behind a black mask and in between a continuous series of Covid-19 tests. “I get tested all the time,” she’d told me earlier from across a wide table, removing the mask to tuck into that gilded egg.