Dua Lipa defines new rules for what it is to be a pop star

Dua Lipa writes songs, hosts a book podcast, and speaks out politically, says Colin Sheridan

Dua Lipa performs in Chile last November: She is desirable, complex, outspoken, inconvenient, ambitious, and self-directed. That is why she feels like the pop cultural icon of this moment.

Celebrities are expected to be endlessly available and endlessly legible, but singer Dua Lipa has become one of the defining cultural figures without surrendering to the flattening machinery of fame.

That is no small thing, because women in music are still too often reduced to cliches: The ingénue, the siren, the survivor, the scandal, the body, the brand. They are over-sexualised, over-explained, over-managed and, then, inevitably, over-judged. Dua Lipa has not escaped that; nobody as famous as she is can. But she has refused to be contained by it.