Her name is Dua Lipa: “Dua” means “love” in Albanian, and “Lipa” is her surname, of Kosovo-Albanian origin. Having fled the Yugoslav Wars for London, Lipa has long spun a success story of exile and resilience.

While Albanian is her mother tongue, it was the English of PR agents that she mastered most quickly. As a teenager, she worked simultaneously in catering and as a nightclub waitress a gogo dancer, they say before becoming a model for ASOS at sixteen. She left the platform when a manager suggested she lose weight: the first founding act of a perfectly marketable feminist narrative.

Since then, she has endorsed Jaguar’s electric car British luxury on life support and some describe her, with a dubious sort of tenderness, as “beautiful as a brand-new truck” or “made up like a stolen car.” An industrial metaphor for a mechanically constructed muse.

In August 2019, she partnered with Yves Saint Laurent for the fragrance Libre: an official success, though met with more discreet enthusiasm in cynical circles. In August 2020, she became a global ambassador for Évian, likely for the symbolism of transparency a highly prized concept when everything is carefully opaque.

As for her copyright lawsuit over the song Levitating, it clearly hasn’t spooked Lord Arnault. Following in Pharrell’s footsteps, Arnault seems to view the line between inspiration and duplication as a mere aesthetic detail. In contemporary luxury, originality is a story to be told, not a requirement.

In the attention economy, Lipa remains a perfectly calibrated product: a rebranded exiled past, a sponsored present, and a future already optioned by the next contract.

FM