My study of gender manipulation, though not a new endeavor in the fields of art and fashion, has been both revealing and terrifying — perhaps my most emotionally challenging performance to date. Beginning as an invention of my mind, Jo Calderone was created with Nick Knight as a mischievous experiment. After working together tirelessly and passionately for years, eating bovine hearts, throwing up on ourselves, giving birth to an alien nation and an AK-47, Nick and I began to wonder: how much exactly can we get away with? Given the nature of this V Magazine issue, an exploration of “the model,” I felt it appropriate to investigate, in diary form, how the past few months of my work have been a deliberate attack on the “idea” of the “modern model,” or, in my case, the “modern pop singer.” How can we remodel the model? In a culture that attempts to quantify beauty with a visual paradigm and almost mathematical standard, how can we fuck with the malleable minds of onlookers and shift the world’s perspective on what’s beautiful? I asked myself this question. And the answer? Drag.

Check out the rest of Gaga’s V Magazine fashion column here.