Lady Gaga performing at the Accor Arena in Paris, November 17, 2025. NICKO GUIHAL
Outside Paris's Accor Arena on Monday, November 17, Lady Gaga's inventive eccentricity spread to her fans, whom she affectionately called her "Little Monsters." Thrilled to embrace the phenomenon of cosplay – dressing up as fictional characters – they, mostly women, donned platinum blonde wigs and square black sunglasses like Hitchcockian assassins, fashioned hair rollers out of soda cans – which somehow made it past security checks – or wore macabre bridal gowns in classic gothic tradition. At the end of the Mayhem Ball, the new tour whose European leg concludes in the French capital on November 22, fans will have another chance to refresh their wardrobes.
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Lady Gaga's 'Mayhem,' a meticulously arranged album
Indeed, Lady Gaga hosts balls rather than performs mere concerts. That was the case in July 2022 when she took over the Stade de France for The Chromatica Ball, pushing the limits of scale in a dark fantasy world, with a reinforced concrete set as a tribute to brutalist architecture. As with the 2018 Joanne World Tour, a country-pop epic cut short by hospitalization due to fibromyalgia (to the disappointment of her Parisian audience), she opted this time to return to the more "modest" scale of arenas. As she announced, the goal was "something more intimate, closer, more connected, that lends itself to the theatrical art of live performance that I love so much." It's all relative.
