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Perhaps inspired by her visit to the Johnson Space Center earlier in the week, Dua Lipa shows up to try Texas barbecue for the first time in what can only be described as astronaut drip. The British–Kosovar Albanian singer is wearing flared, silver Courrèges trousers that look like one half of a groovy space suit, and diamond Eéra carabiner earrings that might come in handy if the International Space Station were to radio “Houston, we have a problem” down to Mission Control. Houston is one stop of 28 on the U.S. leg of Dua’s Future Nostalgia world tour, delayed three times until this year, when it was finally given a go for launch.
Space—a sense of the universal and the communal—provides a metaphor for what she hopes to achieve with her music, Dua explains, as we settle into a back corner table at Truth BBQ, a Central Texas–style joint in the historic Heights neighborhood of my childhood hometown. “Everyone has their own version of spirituality,” she says. “Sometimes when you talk about it, it can sound cliché. But for me, God is just what you put out there and what you get back. I’m trying to bring people together with music, trying to bring light, you know? There’s a cosmic element to sharing songs that make people feel seen or understood.”
Bringing people together with music—and dancing, and roller-skating, and vast quantities of rainbow confetti—is just what Dua accomplishes on tour for her acclaimed second album. Her 90-minute show is a disco-themed birthday party for grown-ups, though revelers young enough to require protective headphones are invited too. The set list draws almost entirely from the infectiously dance-y Future Nostalgia, which was released, inopportunely, in March 2020. But the two-year delay between album and tour only seems to hype the show’s party atmosphere.
“I didn’t get to see people’s reaction to the album in real life,” she tells me. “So being on tour and seeing the crowds is like, Oh, it was a really big album. I get so excited seeing people coming together as a collective.”
Dua’s fun ride of a show pays testament to how far the 26-year-old has come as a performer, and proudly showcases her improved dance skills, where everything from swing to tango to pole dance shows up in the moves she’s honed with choreographer Charm La’Donna, a former backup dancer for Madonna who’s worked with Selena Gomez and Kendrick Lamar. Even a viral shimmy Dua was mocked for on TikTok a few years ago finds its way into her encore performance of “Don’t Start Now,” a physical clapback to the haters, with a dash of self-deprecation.
“All I ever wanted was for it to be about the music,” Dua says. “My goal was, I want the music to be good enough so that people would talk about that more than anything else. But unless you’re a fully formed pop star who’s trained in pop-star camp for five fucking years before you hit the stage for the first time, one misstep, one wrong move, one dance that doesn’t really work and it’s used against you. That was fucking hard for me.”
The locals who have weathered a two-hour line for Truth’s 15-hour smoked-beef brisket don’t quite know what to make of this now fully formed pop star in their midst. Many diners avert their eyes to evaluate her only from their periphery, the way children are instructed to do when learning not to stare at the sun. Dua cuts an intimidating figure, standing nearly six feet tall in heels, but she wasn’t always so imposing. As a child, she was the most diminutive in her peer group, so to make up for it, she started wearing high heels at 13.
“All my friends had boyfriends before me,” she recalls. “No one fancied me! Every girl was more developed. And I was just like, Fuck, I have no idea if I’m ever gonna grow.” At 18, Dua had a dramatic growth spurt, and last year, at 25, she improbably gained another vertical inch.
Dua, whose name means “love” in Albanian, stands out not merely because of her physical presence but for the way she’s chosen to use her star power. Despite her domination of the charts, Dua isn’t competitive by nature, which she attributes to being from the tight-knit Kosovar community. “They have given me so much. They believed in me before anyone else did. So I want to be able to lift other people up if I have the opportunity,” she says. At the start of her tour in February, she unveiled Service95, a subscription newsletter focused on global creatives and activist voices, as well as a podcast called At Your Service, where Dua has shown herself to be an adept interviewer, whether she’s speaking to Elton John, with whom she recently collaborated on their top 10 hit, “Cold Heart,” or Nobel Peace laureate Nadia Murad. (Service95 gets its name from Dua’s wish to be “of service” beyond music, plus her birth year.)
Before Dua had Murad on her podcast, she met the 29-year-old Yazidi activist last fall in D.C., where Murad is pursuing a degree in sociology at American University while running Nadia’s Initiative, a nonprofit aiding survivors of sexual violence in conflict areas. Murad was kidnapped by ISIS in northern Iraq in 2014 and sold into slavery before she managed to escape. One of the projects her group oversees is the drafting of the Murad Code, a guideline for governments, journalists, and other investigative bodies on appropriate ways to document sexual violence and to interact with survivors.
“Dua saw me as a survivor, not a victim. She showed that she knew the difference in the language she was using,” Murad tells me via Zoom, with her husband and fellow activist, Abid Shamdeen, interpreting. “The word victim, and the stigma that comes with it, is always attached to women. Men are survivors, though, because they fought. But we fought, too.” Approximately 6,000 women and children from Murad’s Yazidi community, an ethno-religious minority in Iraq, were abducted by ISIS, and almost half of those taken remain missing.
Although Dua was born in London, her ancestral roots are firmly planted in Kosovo. Her deep identification with the plight of Kosovar Albanians, who were targets of a relentless campaign of ethnic cleansing in the final years of the 20th century, has given her a perspective rarely found in the globally famous. “I’m always on the side of the oppressed,” says Dua, a vociferous supporter of refugee groups, LGBTQ rights, and racial justice. She’s also pro–Labour Party, anti-Brexit, and confounded by the proliferation of guns in the U.S.
“Being from the U.K., it’s hard for me to wrap my head around. When I’m in the car with someone in America and they have, like, a little bit of road rage, I’m always like, ‘Don’t do it. You have no idea who that other person is and if they’re carrying a gun,’ ” she says, in a room in which it’s statistically likely that nearly half its diners own one.
Evading violence is exactly what Dua’s parents, Dukagjin and Anesa, did in 1992 when they left Pristina as part of an exodus of some one million Albanians from the region during Slobodan Milosevic’s systematic persecution of Kosovo’s ethnic majority. Their respective studies in dentistry and law were derailed by their move to London, where they instead found work in a pub called The Globe Tavern across the street from their flat. The couple married in March 1995 on that same street, with a party held afterward at the pub. Dua was born later that year.
Dua’s sister Rina and brother Gjin—whom Dua calls her “babies”—followed over the next decade. Rina, an actor based in London, tells me, “Dua’s my dad’s twin, you know? Copy, paste. They have similar work ethics and share a love for music”—Dukagjin was in a rock band, Oda, in his 20s—“and my mom is so family-oriented and always the one saying, ‘Look after your siblings.’ So that’s where Dua got her protectiveness.”
Dukagjin eventually earned a business degree and moved the family back to Kosovo for work when Dua was 11. Overnight, Dua went from being the Albanian girl who wanted to be called “Amber” to seem more English, to the English girl who spoke Albanian with an accent. That move back to Pristina forged an understanding of her dual identity. “Hearing my aunts’ and my grandma’s and friends’ stories about losing their fathers, their brothers, having them dragged away from their homes in Kosovo—the things that happened to them shook me to the core,” she remembers.
The experience of living between two worlds and sometimes feeling like an outsider in both drives the content of Service95. Drag superstar Sasha Velour served as a recent guest editor to provide a history lesson on the gender-complicating art form. Balmain creative director Olivier Rousteing, who is Black, gay, and adopted, was Dua’s first podcast guest. And the female artists she showcases on the podcast and in the newsletter—rapper Megan Thee Stallion, Afghan DJ Yelda Ali, Asian American novelist Hanya Yanagihara, whose latest work, To Paradise, Dua counts as one of her favorites—form the backbone of it all. The newsletter staff is majority female, helmed by British Vogue contributing editor Funmi Fetto, who authored Palette: The Beauty Bible for Women of Color.
As a large platter of pork ribs, brisket, and cheese-stuffed sausages arrives at our table, Dua recalls her first brush with claiming her own power. “I’ve always had this anger toward the patriarchy,” she says. “I just never liked boys telling me what to do.” That’s easily gleaned from Future Nostalgia’s anti-mansplaining manifesto, “Boys Will Be Boys,” the closest thing to a ballad on a record of wall-to-wall bangers. Dua recalls a game from her primary school years in London called kiss-chase. “Boys would start it and chase the girls around the playground, trying to kiss us. So you’re running around and laughing, but it’s a nervous laughter. You don’t really know what’s happening, and you’re supposed to be like, Oh, the boys fancy me. Like it was a game about winning their approval. I hated that.”
At around age seven or eight, little Dua turned the tables. “There was a day where I just wasn’t in the mood to run,” she says. “By then I’d learned a tactic. I don’t know how I picked it up, but when a boy would come near me, I’d say, ‘Yeah, come here.’ ” She wags a finger toward herself in reenactment. “And then I would pinch their shoulders like this”—her orange chrome nails clip together, like talons snatching their prey—“until they fell to their knees. That was the point when I started standing up to boys, and the boys started being scared of me.”
Not all of the topics Dua explores through Service95 skew serious. There are more conventional lifestyle features in the newsletter—on jewelry, skin care, and, perhaps Dua’s greatest love, where to eat. At lunch she produces her phone, sheathed in an iridescent pink Rimowa case, to show me the exhaustive lists she’s compiled of favorite restaurants in Tokyo, Lebanon, Nashville, Copenhagen, and Mexico City, to name a few. And yes, she eats. The ribs, with her hands even, noting when little meat bits get stuck under those gleaming nails. Dua’s also a fantastic cook, according to Rina, who says her older sister has taken over Christmas dinner duties, where Dua makes her Yorkshire pudding and everything else from scratch.
“I mean, we try to help,” Rina says, in amused resignation.
Sharing what she loves with an audience is an old habit that harks back to Dua’s student days, when she returned to London solo, at 15, living with a family friend while enrolled at Parliament Hill, a girls’ secondary and sixth form school in Camden, and, on weekends, the storied Sylvia Young Theatre School. Her teenage blog, called Dua Daily, was a diary of Gen Z adolescence. “I would write about what I was doing after school, what smoothies I was making, or what top I bought from Topshop when Topshop still existed,” she recalls. Instagram now serves as Dua Daily 2.0, where 82 million followers track her comings and goings, though the street fashion of her youth has been replaced by street-cred luxury labels like Coperni and Marine Serre.
The fluidity with which she navigates the serious and the trivial, the high and the low, may be a watermark of her generation, but it seems particular to Dua, a polymath who describes herself as “psycho-organized” and has her calendar scheduled down to the minute, including when it’s time for a shower. As we near the end of lunch, Dua steals one more bite of sausage. Her packed schedule for the rest of the day includes rehearsing new choreography that will debut in a week, when Megan Thee Stallion briefly joins the tour to perform their sugar rush of a collaboration, “Sweetest Pie.” Dua’s co-songwriter and dear friend Clarence Coffee Jr. estimates Dua came up with her part of the song in under an hour.
“I wish more people could see how she is as an artist in a room,” Coffee tells me on a recent visit to Los Angeles from London. “She has incredible ideas, she’s a great lyricist, and she’s a beast with melodies.”
Megan Thee Stallion—Meg, as she’s known offstage—admits that before recording with Dua, she wasn’t convinced they would click. “When somebody is so gorgeous and established, you don’t know what to expect,” she explains. “A lot of ladies can be divas. But Dua is just so nice. She felt like a familiar spirit. We have an unspoken bond, it’s not even anything we need to discuss. Sometimes people get the wrong idea about me, too. But once you meet me, you’re like, Oh! This is my homegirl.”
After Dua plays Houston and strips off her final costume, a custom Mugler bodysuit studded with 120,000 Swarovski crystals, she’ll board a jet to Dallas, where she’ll perform again the next night, but not before delivering the inaugural speech at the opening of Texas’s first Albanian school. (A wellspring for the language and culture, Albanian schools all but disappeared in Kosovo under Milosevic’s regime, so their resurgence bears special significance.) As we part, she cheerily agrees to take photos with Truth BBQ’s young pitmaster, Leonard Botello, and the restaurant’s co-owner, Abbie Byrom. Then she hugs me not once, but twice, pressing her forearm into my back to bring me close.
Two weeks later in Beverly Hills, on a spring morning shrouded in marine layer, we meet for yoga. While Texas barbecue may have been my home turf, now I’m in the domain of someone whose perfectly executed headstands have their own fan base on Instagram. Before Dua arrives at the studio, her teacher, Annie, a petite Venezuelan hired to ensure that the pop star stays healthy for nine months of touring, spreads two decks of cards, one purple, one turquoise, face down on the floor. These cards—which go by many names, like divination, oracle, mindfulness, affirmation—make regular appearances in Dua’s life. Coffee describes a typical day in the studio: “We bring our oracle cards, we sage, we light the palo santo, we speak to the cosmos. We ask to be vessels for the day. We leave it to what some people would call fate.” London-based model and swimwear designer Sarah Lysander, one of her best friends from Parliament Hill, reveals that Dua’s quite a capable tarot reader herself.
“When we’re together, she’ll sit all us girls around and read our cards. We’ll have a cup of tea in her living room, and it’s like she’s the mom reading a story to all her children,” Lysander says. “She’s always been interested in star signs and crystals. I wouldn’t be surprised if she became a mind reader, one day.”
Annie tells me that the cards she’s brought to yoga are “messages from the universe to help you set an intention for your practice.” Just then Dua appears, at 9 a.m. on the dot, makeup-free and wearing her long chocolate mane loose and parted in the middle. (The next week, she’ll wear it platinum for the Grammys to pair with her 1992 vintage Versace bondage dress, evoking creative director Donatella.) For our session she’s dressed in black leggings and a matching cropped tank by Puma, a brand for which she’s issued two Y2K-inspired capsules.
There’s a hug for each of us—Dua’s a hugger, which she ascribes to being Albanian—before we’re instructed to pull one card from each deck. Though Dua in yoga clothes is the most dressed down I’ve seen her, her nails are still show-ready: stiletto talons painted pink, coral, and silver in a kaleidoscopic Pucci pattern. She waves her psychedelic manicure back and forth over the cards as though reading their energy with her fingertips. Once she’s made her choices, she flips them over. “The way you see the world is the reflection of what you have built in your life,” she intones, reading the first card in that old-soul husk that belies her youth. “Think about what hurts you the most and heal it. You have that power.” The single word printed on her other card leaps off its face: rebirth.
We’re two years minus a day from the release of Future Nostalgia, Dua notes, after we finish our 45-minute vinyasa class. The album’s continued popularity has made her the female artist with the most tracks streamed over a billion times on Spotify this year. Once we’ve repaired to the rooftop lounge outside the studio, where the morning fog has burned off to reveal a bright, hot sun, I ask Dua if she ever gets sick of these songs or feels as if she’s outgrown them. She considers my question.
“For two years we were frozen. I didn’t get to really do these songs in the way that I’d envisioned them, and now that I’ve been able to put a show around it, it feels new to me,” she explains. “But there are also ways I feel I’m moving on a little bit. Especially now that I’ve started writing again and working on new music.” She estimates that her next album is half-written, and while she doesn’t clarify if or how her third album will depart from her previous work, she says this: “I’ve definitely grown up. Overall, whether it’s sonically or in terms of the themes, I’ve matured. It’s like I’m coming into my power and not afraid to talk about things. It’s about understanding what I want.”
And what Dua wants right now is Dua. Single and content to be so, she says, “The next chapter of my life is about truly being good with being alone.” For the second installment of Service95, she took herself out on a date to New York’s Cosme and wrote about it. “Some people on the internet were like, ‘Oh, Dua went out for dinner on her own, blah blah, I do this all the time.’ And I think that’s amazing if you do it all the time. You must be so confident. But it was a big step for me. I was nervous—like, what am I gonna do? I don’t want to be on my phone.” Her next planned solo adventure is to go to the movies. “I want to know I can just be there for myself, you know?”
“Right,” I answer. “And not have it be like, This sad woman—”
“Out on her own or whatever, and—”
“She doesn’t have—”
“A man,” Dua concludes. “Yeah. Fuck that.”
In this story: hair, Evanie Frausto; makeup, Marcelo Gutierrez. Produced by AP STUDIOS. Set Design: Spencer Vrooman. Furniture, Green River Project.