JoJo Siwa is opening up about her viral magazine cover.
On Tuesday, Oct. 8, the 21-year-old dancer and singer appeared on the Talk Tuah podcast hosted by Haliey Welch, also known as “Hawk Tuah Girl.” During the conversation, Welch, also 21, brought up Siwa’s recent headline-making photo shoot for LadyGunn in which she donned an embellished chest plate and fake bulge.
“The stone bulge is — we were just giving a little spice, a little gender-bend, a little, you can be anything you want to be,” Siwa said of the ensemble. “It just was spicing myself up a little.”
The Dance Moms alum also likened the viral moment to Harry Styles’ controversial Vogue cover from 2020. “It’s like back in the day when Harry Styles wore a dress,” Siwa continued. “Obviously, wearing a bulge is a little different than wearing a dress.”
She further explained, “One thing about me is I like to be for the people that are different, the people who don’t fit in and for the people who are just unafraid to take risks. And I feel like being that person, I have to go as far as I possibly can into the risk.”
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As for the backlash from the photo shoot, the “Karma” singer says, “It’s brutal.”
“It’s really hard,” she added. “People are just d—s.”
Styles, 30, solidified himself as a fashion trailblazer with his December 2020 cover of Vogue. In addition to being the first man to land a solo cover of the iconic magazine, the Grammy winner also shook the internet for wearing a lace-trimmed dress and tuxedo jacket. The look was created by his friend and (former) Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele.
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“Clothes are there to have fun with and experiment with and play with. What’s really exciting is that all of these lines are just kind of crumbling away,” Styles said in the cover story. “When you take away ‘There’s clothes for men and there’s clothes for women,’ once you remove any barriers, obviously you open up the arena in which you can play.”
He continued: “I’ll go in shops sometimes, and I just find myself looking at the women’s clothes thinking they’re amazing. It’s like anything—anytime you’re putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself. There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never really thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something.”
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