When Lady Gaga strode onto Coachella’s main stage in April, she was impossible to miss. She wore a velvet Elizabethan-style bodice and a tiered skirt big enough to claim its own postcode, channelling a gothic, extraterrestrial high priestess of pop to the opening bars of Bloody Mary from her 2011 album Born This Way. It was the first real hint of the visual world she’s building for the tour behind her new album, Mayhem.

What almost no one in the crowd knew was that some of those meticulously constructed looks came from the mind of 26-year-old Taiwanese-Australian fashion designer Samuel Lewis. “It was crazy to me because I’ve been a fan of Gaga since I was a child, so watching her walk out in something I worked on was surreal,” says Lewis, who was watching from the crowd.

“Of course there are always nerves about whether everything will go right, but at some point you have to surrender and allow the work to speak for itself,” he says.

“Being immersed in a real audience allows you to see the work from their point of view. The gasps and the oohs from people were insane.”

It was a far cry from learning to sew with his mother as a boy, and something he couldn’t have imagined as a student only a few years ago. The opportunity arrived via an Instagram message from Los Angeles-based styling duo Peri Rosenzweig and Nick Royal, with whom Lewis had previously worked while dressing American musician Yves Tumor. For him, it was nothing short of a dream come true.

“I always wanted to dress her, but you sometimes forget about your goals or your dreams. When I got that message, I was like, ‘damn, this is something I wasn’t even paying attention to’, but it came just on a whim.”

In December, his designs will reach hundreds of thousands more when Gaga brings her Mayhem tour to Australia, her first visit in more than a decade.

It caps off an extraordinary few years for Lewis, who has, in the three years since graduating from fashion school, already dressed Madonna, Kali Uchis, Jennie Kim of K-pop group Blackpink, and pop star Chappell Roan, who wore his rock-and-roll take on a nun’s habit – a tongue-in-cheek nod to The Flying Nun – for a performance at the Hinterland Music Festival in Iowa earlier this year.

He might not be a household name yet, but the young designer was already a rising star in 2022, when a look from his graduate collection was shown at Naomi Campbell’s Fashion4Relief Runway Show.

“It’s just a really cool experience to know that my clothes will be seen in my home. So I’m excited for people to experience it, it’s just really a full circle moment,” says Lewis, speaking via Zoom from Melbourne, where he lives when not travelling for work.

The first three looks of Gaga’s so-called Mayhem Ball – a two-and-a-half-hour spectacle designed to match the album’s larger-than-life sound – were created by Lewis in collaboration with a team of stylists, set designers and artists. Its scale and ambition, which he describes as a “gothic opera,” show what’s possible when a designer like Lewis is given both resources and room to experiment

“There was a lot of freedom to be able to create things that are over the top and things that you technically wouldn’t have the opportunity to create in any other setting,” he says.

One of the most striking moments is the show’s opening look: an enormous velvet gown that parts to reveal a steel framework packed with writhing dancers. In a life-size Russian doll sequence, the gown is removed to uncover a satin, puff-sleeved, prom-style dress with a glittering sash, and then finally a black corset adorned with a bejewelled crucifix and a lace habit.

The latter two looks were carefully handstitched by Lewis and fellow costume designer Seth Pratt. It’s the final, lingerie-inspired look that Lewis says is his favourite.

“There is something about the way it is so simple but really highlights the darkness within her character, and the fine lace veil with the cross in the back harks back to a lot of the past eras of Gaga that inspired me.”

Despite the grandeur of the costume, Lewis says the greatest challenge wasn’t the scale but the shift in context. Like most designers, he was accustomed to creating for runways and editorial shoots – not for the physical demands of a live performance.

“With something like red carpet or editorial, a piece is just meant to be beautiful. The thing that was the most difficult to understand was just the idea of movement – it wasn’t normal movement. Gaga was going so crazy in the dance, and it was all thanks to her choreographer Parris Goebel [the 33-year-old New Zealand choreographer who has worked with the likes of Rihanna, Justin Bieber and Jennifer Lopez],” he says.

“So it was up to us to make sure that whatever we dressed her in still had the attitude of something you could photograph and put in a magazine… but that she could move in.”

Does he ever feel intimidated working with such industry heavyweights and superstars of Lady Gaga’s stature?

“I always think that imposter syndrome never goes away, even if you’re the boss in the room. But weirdly, in those rooms [with Gaga], I didn’t really feel any sort of imposter syndrome,” Lewis says, with quiet self-assuredness.

“Obviously, there were always nerves before going into a room full of very important people, but that’s when the fight or flight takes over. My genetic knowledge of what I do was the thing that took over.”

Lewis speaks with a slight American twang, thanks to his diplomat father’s work with the Australian embassy that saw the family move across India, Vietnam, New Zealand and the Philippines.

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The creative gene runs strong. His mother – once an aspiring designer – nurtured her children’s creativity, teaching Lewis to hand sew. Lewis’ older sister works as a photographer, art director and stylist.

“It’s hard for parents to send their kids off to do something creative, especially because you never know how it’s going to turn out and it’s a path less followed, but my parents were always really supportive of it,” he says.

As a young boy, Lewis first discovered fashion – and its potential for storytelling – through Alexander McQueen, the late British designer renowned for his theatrical, often controversial work.

It’s fitting, then, that two of his creative heroes, Lady Gaga and McQueen, shared a close creative partnership before McQueen’s death in 2010.

“I was so deeply inspired by Gaga growing up, and she really shaped my vision of what fashion could be. Some of my favourite looks come from the Bad Romance and Alejandro videos, which were full of McQueen pieces from ‘Plato’s Atlantis’, one of my favourite McQueen collections, as well as the opening look of Alejandro being a custom version of a McQueen runway look I adore.”

“I also have a soft spot for the video portraits she did for the Louvre where she impersonated famous historical paintings, maybe less fashion focused, but as a historical art lover it has always been a favourite of mine.”

After finishing high school, Lewis moved to Florence in Italy to study at Polimoda, a fashion school co-founded by revered designer Emilio Pucci.

“I really wanted to have a European experience with fashion, and I chose Florence because like Paris, it’s one of the capitals that really focuses on craft, and there’s a deep history there of couture,” he says.

As a lover of art history, particularly classical portraiture, Lewis found Florence to be the perfect extension of his education.

“Being able to walk down the street and kind of be confronted by all of this sculpture or art or buildings that have been around for centuries. It’s something that’s quite indescribable.”

His graduate collection from 2022 – “Do Angels Need Haircuts?” – featured, religious iconography and dramatic, sweeping silhouettes inspired by pioneering couturiers such as Charles James and Cristobel Balenciaga.

Why is religious imagery such a rich text for his work?

“I’ve studied in Catholic schools before, so religious education has been part of my life in at multiple points,” Lewis says.

“But it also comes from being so involved in art history, film and theatre, where religious imagery is so strong. A lot of art throughout history has been commissioned or created solely for religion. So anyone engaging or looking at art throughout the past is going to be influenced by religion just because of the hand it played in so much of history.”

Alongside his work on tour costumes, Lewis also designed the leather, gothic gown Gaga wore to the MTV Video Music Awards earlier this year, three of the looks in the music video for her song ABRACADABRA and, most recently, the custom velvet jacket she wore on the cover of Rolling Stone.

These opportunities helped translate Lewis’ work from the cloistered world of high fashion to the mainstream.

“That’s the magic of celebrity and celebrity dressing, is that it’s not just about fashion any more. It becomes part of pop culture, which is easily accessible to everyone,” Lewis says.

This accessibility has seen Gaga fans (aka “little monsters”) crafting near beat-for-beat recreations of Lewis’ costumes.

“Seeing so many people referencing these outfits and showing up to the tour in them is really insane, and also just insane from a technical perspective because people are creating these outfits like a day after they’ve been revealed, and it was already hard for us to construct them, let alone someone at home just doing it themselves,” he says.

Traditionally, aspiring designers have had to climb the rungs of the industry from the bottom up, toiling away in fashion houses for decades in the hope of finally making their big break. But the magic of social media has, to some extent, done away with all this.

“Fashion is still very much a closed industry, and it’s kind of only really reserved for people that have a lot of privilege to be able to sacrifice a lot of things just to be in the room,” says Lewis, who had been working as an intern for London-based fashion brand Mowalola when his designs started getting noticed.

“Having the ability to use social media as a tool to get your work out there is like being able to construct your own path and take control of your own future. It’s becoming a huge asset to a lot of young designers now,” Lewis says.

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Alongside his work with Gaga, Lewis has been busy working on his debut collection under his own brand.

“It’s still following this more gothic, dark energy, but never in a way that’s, scary or, unapproachable, and it’s a more, melancholic feeling,” Lewis says.

“Because of my graduate collection being quite over the top and theatrical, there’s been a trajectory of me doing a lot of costume and red carpet, but I’ve always been very interested in ready to wear. I want to be able to dress everybody, not just celebrities.”

Long term, Lewis has set his ambitions high.

“It’s always been a huge dream of mine to be able to take over one of the [fashion] houses to be a creative director. Being able to inject your essence into an existing brand is the biggest opportunity because it really allows you to act on a calibre that you wouldn’t have otherwise.”