David LaChapelle has spent much of his career photographing pop icons — among them Cher, Janet Jackson, and Madonna. For the cover of New York’s “Fall Preview” issue, he added Charli XCX to that list, creating a photo portfolio that captures the fever-dream quality of Charli’s rise to superstardom. Here, LaChapelle explains how the concept came to life.
I’ve always loved the rawness of B-movies and tabloids and Hollywood Babylon. Charli’s had such a strong career, but this is a new level for her, and I wanted to do something that was kind of tabloid but also add some surreal elements dealing with the nature of how she’s exploded. The shoot is playing with those ideas in a humorous way.
The underwater shot — that’s the water birth of Charli into the bratosphere. On the cover, she’s escaping the paparazzi and running from the downside of fame, the tabloid side of it. And she’s broken free, but she’s still got handcuffs on. It could be a B-movie poster, right? I didn’t put any context behind what she was being arrested for. She was just breaking the rules. Being brat and breaking the rules.
She’s sort of trapped by fame and all the tabloid photographers are chasing her. An animal trapped in the woods would bite off its own limb — she bites off her hand. As she lies on the stretcher, you see people still taking photos of her, the paparazzi and the fans. People will watch the rise as much as they’ll watch the fall. Then she’s brought to the hospital and probably given some sort of painkiller. She’s hallucinating. She’s stuck in a dreamscape, but in the end, she frees herself.
The hallucination kind of encapsulates the whole shoot. Instead of a real Hollywood tragedy, it’s more of a fantasized one. And it’s not to be read into too much, but, yeah, maybe she’s hallucinating about this whole thing — this sudden meteoric rise with Brat, then Kamala Harris. That’s a lot to take in for anyone.
I’ve seen a lot of pop stars in my career, and when they get to the next level, it really wears them out and shakes ’em up. But I think she has enough experience under her belt that she’s going to handle all of it really well. It wasn’t a sudden thing, and it wasn’t something she didn’t want. She has been doing this for a long time. She’s ready for it.
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