Dua Lipa has been making headlines since the release of her hit single "Hotter Than Hell"
in 2016. And while you may not have heard of her until then, she's actually been making
music for most of her life. Here's a peek at her stunning transformation.
In 1995, Dua Lipa was born to Anesa and Dukagjin Lipa in London.
“Being born in London and having a full Albanian name like Dua.
People pronouncing it-” “It means love right?” “It means love in Albanian, yeah”
Her parents worked as waiters,
but her father was also studying business and her mother trained in travel and tourism.
Just a few years earlier, though, her parents' lives had been very different.
In 1992, Anesa and Dukagjin fled their native Kosovo when war broke out. Dukagjin's father
led the Kosovo Institute of History at the time that the conflict developed.
As Dua recalled to The Guardian in 2018,
"Once the Serbians came in, they wanted a lot of the historians to rewrite the
history. To change it – that Kosovo was always part of Serbia and never part
of Yugoslavia. And my grandfather was one of those people who wouldn't, so he lost his job,
because he didn't want to write a history that he didn't believe to be true."
Before this time, Dukagjin was pursuing a career in dentistry
and Anesa had begun to study law. But moving to London meant that they
had to give up their careers to make ends meet for their growing family.
While growing up in London, Dua Lipa had a very musical childhood. She credits this to her
parents, especially her father, who always had music playing at home. In fact, he'd even been
a singer in a rock band before relocating from Kosovo to London. But even though she grew up in
a creative and musical home, her parents never pressured young Dua to pursue music. Instead,
it came naturally to her, as she would often put on DIY concerts for her parents' dinner guests.
Lipa's parents have remained her biggest fans. When she chose to pursue music instead of going to
college, they were skeptical but supportive of her decision. They travel with her whenever they can,
keeping her grounded to her roots in both London and Kosovo. As she told Elle in 2020,
"Both places are part of me. So much of what I do is in twos. I like juxtapositions in my
music and what I wear. I feel like my dual heritage, being from two places at once,
with all of those things trickling into the other, is what makes me, me."
“Was there a lot or many concerts? Many people coming to Kosovo?” “Um, not as many as I would have liked”
As she was already immersed in her heritage, Dua Lipa was excited to move with her family
to Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, in the 2000s. Although she could speak Albanian,
she couldn't read or write proficiently when she started school there. While living in Kosovo,
she learned about the horrors that took place in the region in the 90s. But when the Lipas moved to
Pristina, the area was much safer than the London neighborhood where they had previously lived. This
allowed Dua to go out with friends and explore the city, bringing her even closer to her heritage.
While living in Kosovo, the budding singer was introduced to hip-hop,
which was gaining traction in the country at the time. Seeing American
artists on a Kosovar stage was a big deal for Lipa and her friends. When she was 13,
she attended her first concert, a Method Man and Redman show,
"You went to see Wu-Tang Clan when you were 13? Your parents are awesome, oh my god!"
and her love for music continued to blossom. She went on to discover even more popular
American rappers like 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg.
"Basically, in Kosovo, people only really listen to hip-hop, like it was so massive out there."
Although Dua Lipa enjoyed living in Kosovo, she quickly realized that the U.K. was the better place to
pursue a music career, as the music industry in Pristina wasn't very significant.
As she explained to The Line of Best Fit, "It's so small you send a CD to the radio station and give CDs to your
friends and the song would be played on the radio, a lot of it was word of mouth."
In order to go global, she decided that she would need a bigger market for her music.
So at the age of 15, she moved back to London, completely on her own.
She moved in with an older friend who attended graduate school,
which made her parents feel much safer about the move, even though this friend was only vaguely
responsible. She continued her education in London at the Sylvia Young Theatre School
and Parliament Hill girls' school. But soon enough, she decided to focus on music full time.
When Lipa was 16, she began modeling for the ASOS Marketplace online catalogue.
But this proved to be a rather short-lived career, as she realized that the industry's
values didn't match her own. A manager told her that she would have to lose weight, but she felt
strongly that she would rather eat junk food than be a runway model. As she told the manager,
"The only reason I'm in this is to make contacts. I just really want to eat Krispy Kreme."
Although Lipa had the courage to tackle modeling when she was a teenager,
she hasn't always been confident throughout her life. As she admitted to Fuse,
"Body confidence issues have definitely played a big role in my life and having that has made
me change my mindset. It now makes me see things in a different light. Being true to who you are
is so important and being able to use your voice to empower that is great."
Before Lipa really hit it big, her sound was more stripped-down and laid-back than what she's known
for. Her debut single "New Love" was released in August 2015, along with a music video that looks
like it came straight from her Instagram feed. On the track, she sings about wanting to find a new
love because she's finding it "harder and harder to breathe." Around that time, she told The Fader,
"'New Love' might sound like a classic tale of unrequited love [...] But at the time I was
writing this song it was about finding my place in an industry that often seems to neither want nor
need you. This is a song about facing the fear of losing the only thing that matters to you."
"New Love" ultimately didn't receive much attention from critics or fans, but Lipa's
next few singles gave her the push that propelled her into the spotlight. She's credited one song in
particular, "Hotter Than Hell," for launching her career, as it helped others understand her style.
In the wake of that song's success, she chose to announce a tour rather than an album.
So she embarked on her Hotter Than Hell European tour in October 2016,
before opening for Troye Sivan in the United States later that year.
This was her big break in America, and she felt welcomed in the country. As she noted to Fuse,
"It was quite an easy transition, but it was definitely a scary one."
Lipa has admitted that she wished she'd had the chance to see her favorite musicians
while growing up, but when she lived in Kosovo, not many artists came there to
perform. So she and her family created the Sunny Hill Foundation and festival,
an annual celebration of music that raises funds for Pristina's most at-risk populations.
"Look at you now though, you're doing this cool thing and you're having a festival in Kosovo." "Yeah"
"And making concerts so that little girls can go to a concert and become to a Lipa"
It all began in 2016, when Lipa's father organized a concert featuring
her in Kosovo's National Park. As the festival became an annual event,
more artists traveled to the country in support. Miley Cyrus even performed at the festival,
making her the first international female artist to perform in the country.
"For me, it was like the biggest dream come true, like just seeing how happy and
how excited people were to see her on stage, and she absolutely killed it. She killed it."
Lipa has also even paid tribute to the charity with a tattoo
that reads "SUNNY HILL" on her right arm.
On June 2, 2017, after much anticipation,
Dua Lipa's self-titled debut album was finally released. She had teased her
fans with the album artwork nearly a year earlier, as she explained on Facebook,
"I'm so excited to share my album artwork with you and thank you guys for being so
patient and supportive. The reason it is self-titled is because this album is me.
It's a representation of who I am as a person and as an artist."
"New Rules" was the tenth track on the album,
and it reached number 1 when it was released as a single in the summer of 2017,
making it the first chart-topper by a female solo artist in the UK in nearly two years. The
lyrics of this empowering anthem give listeners a list of rules for getting over an ex-boyfriend.
In a behind-the-scenes clip on the making of the song's music video, Lipa explained,
"I wanted it to show that you and your friends are kind of helping each other.
Your friends are the rules. They're the ones
that are kind of preventing you from making this mistake with this guy."
Lipa also explained that she chose to include flamingos on set and in the choreography because,
like the girls in the cast, they represent unity and community when they travel in flocks.
The ways that flamingos move their heads and their eyes, as well as the rhythm they show off when
moving in a group, inspired the pose-like stances that the dancers display throughout the video.
"It was finding all these weird dance moves that show how close I am with my friends or with these group of girls."
"I think it's going to be my favorite video."
Lipa's debut album originally consisted of 12 tracks, and then in 2018 it was re-released with
three new songs, including a collaboration with K-pop group BLACKPINK. It appeared on a number of
year-end best-of lists in 2017, and as of 2020, it's sold over four million copies worldwide.
In June 2019, Dua Lipa and her longtime boyfriend, model-turned-chef Isaac Carew,
parted ways. They'd been dating on and off since 2013. Representatives of the singer didn't
provide any explanation to the press about the reason for the split. Around that time,
Lipa posted a sweet note for a friend on her Instagram story, as she confessed,
"My bb came to spend a night in Paris [with] me. Friends when you need them the most."
As for Carew, he posted a vague, melancholic photo on his Instagram story with a broken heart emoji.
The next month, Lipa was spotted getting cozy at a music festival with Anwar Hadid,
the younger brother of models Gigi and Bella. The two attended
the British Summer Time Hyde Park music festival in London. As E! News reported,
"They both looked over-the-moon happy together as they listened to live music."
At the time, they'd yet to confirm their relationship,
although they'd previously been spotted together on a date in Malibu.
In March 2020, Dua Lipa surprised her fans by releasing her highly anticipated sophomore album
Future Nostalgia a week earlier than originally scheduled. This decision wasn't a simple one,
as the album was arriving during the early days of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic.
In an Instagram livestream, Lipa admitted,
"I've been a little bit conflicted about putting music out and, you know,
whether it's the right thing to do during this time because lots of people are suffering."
However, she ultimately decided to release the album ahead of schedule
in hopes that it would bring her fans some joy during an unusually uncertain time. The
fans weren't the only consideration in this decision. As the singer explained to NPR,
"I wanted to make sure that I wasn't focusing my energy
on anything negative or anything that was going on online or on social media.
I deleted my Twitter. I just didn't want to get caught up in what the first record did."
She added,
"I wanted to grow and mature as an artist, and take everything that
I learned from the first album cycle and campaign and work towards getting better,
and making music that I'm really really proud of and that I just have fun with."
Future Nostalgia was ultimately very well-received, as it appeared on a
number of year-end best-of lists and garnered a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year. While
Lipa's sound may have evolved since the release of her debut single and her look
may have changed, her message of confidence and authenticity has remained the same throughout.
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