It starts in a flood of red: a red-curtained stage, red flashing lights. It’s Lady Gaga, so theatrics are par for the course. As the lights go up it becomes clear she’s not standing on a giant stage but, in fact, wearing it.
A militaristic bodice extends into the swooping velvet drapes of a 7.5-metre-high gown. “It’s not just a dress; it’s a moving piece of art, an engineering feat,” says the Australian-Taiwanese designer Samuel Lewis, who dreamed up its design, and created it in collaboration with the LA-based costume designer Athena Lawton.
The extent of the costume only becomes apparent when Gaga’s skirt opens to reveal a metal cage underneath, with dancers writhing and reaching behind its steel bars. Lewis had to push his limits to dream of – and achieve – this design. “We had to be like, how giant can something like this be?”
Gaga’s five-star, full-blooded return to OTT camp, the Mayhem Ball tour, isn’t the first time that she and the 26-year-old designer have worked together. Aside from designing all the looks in the tour’s first act, Lewis dressed her for the 2025 Grammys, and for the music videos for Disease (a grey illusion gown made of hand-dyed silk, for a sense of decomposition) and Abracadabra (a red-boned silk dress that plays to Lewis’s love of corsetry).
Since graduating from Florence’s Polimoda in 2024, Lewis has quickly become known among celebrity circles for bringing together meticulous engineering and a kind of chaotic, grungy romanticism; a mix that makes his work feel kinetic and disciplined.
He throws himself into complicated construction – Russian-doll dresses within dresses, impeccably boned corsets, pieces that move, fit together and transform into other things. These pieces have to work, to bear weight and withstand exertion on a stage. Designing for beauty is one thing; designing to survive a performance is wholly another.
Other celebrities who have taken notice of his work include Chappell Roan, members of Blackpink, Julia Fox and Madonna. He’s designing Christina Aguilera’s Christmas-special look, too.
Lewis brushes off the suggestion that he’s precociously talented, preferring instead to talk about his spider’s web of influences. His cultural diet moves in “waves” but film is a big part of it. Right now he is hooked on Only Lovers Left Alive, Jim Jarmusch’s Tilda Swinton-led film from 2013 about vampires who have been alive a little too long, set across Tangier and Detroit.
His pieces are heavily informed by “70s rock and 80s and 90s grunge,” he says, and often concerned with “fabrics that might not be perfect, that have a sense of decay”. He mishmashes Debbie Harry with sumptuous Victoriana, gravitating towards silhouettes that track the shape of a body, then contort to become a touch fantastical.
“I wasn’t always the best designer but, through the pursuit of being a better designer – watching movies, reading books, listening to music, seeing art – I’ve been able to become better. You need to engage with things to become better, I’m a firm believer in that.”
Lewis’s personal style also leans into the sex appeal and fervour of 70s rock: the flares, the peaked collars, the gothic boots. “Putting outfits together is a way to access that design mind, even when I’m not actually designing,” he says. His style might not always be practical: “I’ve been known to pull out a heeled boot on a hike.”
Lewis is based in Melbourne but this year his work has rocketed him around the world from LA to Paris, Italy to South Korea. He was born in Australia but speaks with a lilting international school accent – a legacy of his father’s embassy work, which took the family to the Philippines, Vietnam, India, New Zealand and Austria during Lewis’s childhood.
His latest look for the K-pop supernova Rosé’s performance in Taiwan featured a feather boa in spiralling black and white, a nod to the striking tail feathers of Taiwan’s endemic magpie.
That opportunity came through Instagram. The internet has bridged geographical distance; most of his first high-profile clients found him online. “With the internet, you can make it from wherever you are,” he says. “I’m proof of that.”
But online visibility doesn’t erase the fact that Australian designers are often overlooked until they leave. “A lot of the time, the attention goes to the people who have already established themselves abroad. We still have this idea of Paris and Milan as the ‘true’ signifiers of fashion. But we don’t focus on what’s happening here. We wait till someone’s shown in Paris, and then we say, ‘Oh, now we’re interested.’”
Celebrity, too, has shaped his career. “True art in fashion, these days, is carried by celebrities,” he says. “They’re the ones with the kinds of resources that allow this kind of exploration, to just let you go wild with ideas.”
Now Lewis is turning his mind to his debut collection, which will be part made-to-order and part ready-to-wear. It will land in the first half of 2026 and will be inspired by “the idea of collecting things through time, finding the beauty in everything without caring so much what it is and what it represents – but seeing the magic in it anyway”.
Like a vampire Tilda Swinton? He agrees, with a caveat: “Less existential.”
He says his challenge is to lean into the corsetry and “extreme-looking pieces” he creates for celebrity clients – without expecting his customers to “sacrifice” their ribcages.
“I really want to make something that makes you be like, ‘What the fuck is that? How does it work?’”
