Elle’s May 2020 cover with Dua Lipa hitting newsstands on April 28, has Dua opening up about her releasing ‘Future Nostalgia’ during COVID-19, quarantine-life with Anwar and predictions for our post pandemic existence: “I think things will definitely change. I think we’ll tread differently with Mother Nature—we won’t be as careless as we have been. I think we’ll be more empathetic and make moments count. We won’t take things for granted. I think our world is probably going to change forever.”
Dua Lipa wants to show me her skylights. They’re not hers, exactly, belonging instead to the owners of the London Airbnb where she’s currently self-quarantining with her boyfriend, model Anwar Hadid. It’s actually the second Airbnb the 24-year-old singer has rented since returning from a trip to Australia to find her flat flooded, but they’re rolling with it. I can hear Hadid’s soft laughter as Lipa tilts her laptop toward the ceiling. It’s been four months since the global COVID-19 pandemic began, three weeks since the U.K. and U.S. mandated that nonessential workers stay home, and 14 days since Lipa released her second album, Future Nostalgia. So naturally, this interview is being conducted via Zoom. The skylights are beautiful.
On releasing her album ‘Future Nostalgia’ during the pandemic: Everything was supposed to culminate with a well-timed media blitz—including a Saturday Night Live appearance on March 28 and the release of this cover story about, well, now. And then a bot alerted her label, Warner Records, that the album had leaked a week early. Before that moment, she too had been weighing a delay. “But I think [the leak] just kind of solidified my choice that I wanted it to be out April 3 anyway,” Lipa says. “This is me going into my celestial beliefs, but it was like, Okay, this is just how it’s meant to be. And I am really grateful that the music is out. The way I write my music, I’m always very open, and I allow myself to be vulnerable. And I feel now more than ever that it’s brought me closer to my listeners. I think it’s important to talk about your emotions and to be vulnerable and to show that you’re human.”
On her quarantine life with Anwar Hadid: “Oh my God, I’ve watched so many shows—Ozark, Tiger King, The Night Of, The Outsider, Servant, did I say Ozark? And lots of movies, too.” She and Hadid also recently cooked octopus, an impulse buy from a farm-to-table app. “We were just buying our normal fish and stuff, and octopus came up. So we said, ‘Okay, let’s try something different.’ It’s about making things fun, coming up with different recipes, trying out things that we’ve never done before.”
Which isn’t to say the past several weeks haven’t been hard. “Of course Anwar misses his family, and soon we’ll hopefully get to go back and see them,” she says. Until recently, the couple’s conversations revolved around when they’d be able to see each other in between Lipa’s upcoming tour dates, “but now that we get all this extra time, we’re just making the most of it,” she says. “And that’s been really nice. We’re trying to see the bright side.”
Dua’s predictions for our post pandemic existence: “I think things will definitely change. I think we’ll tread differently with Mother Nature—we won’t be as careless as we have been. I think we’ll be more empathetic and make moments count. We won’t take things for granted. I think our world is probably going to change forever.”
On how this time might impact her next album: “I don’t feel like we’ll want to be reminded too much of this time. Of course, this is a major moment in history that we won’t forget. But I don’t know whether that’s going to influence where my music is going to go next.”P
https://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/a31943034/dua-lipa-future-nostalgia-interview/
Style credit: Charles Varenne
Cover image dress by Gucci