I hear Doja Cat before I see her. I’m standing under basement fluorescents in Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena, being eyed up and down by security guards. Her vocal warm-up drifts through closed doors: “Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh!” Doja’s assistant slips through, gives me the thumbs-up, and ushers me into a dressing room the size of a tennis court, black velvet curtains concealing the walls. The arpeggios continue—“la-la-la-la-la-la-la!”—and then, as my presence is announced, Doja’s silky, supple voice switches to a theater-kid vibrato: “I like ho-o-o-ot guys!”
Behind a black pleather sofa in the far corner of the room, a flaming Ziggy Stardust wig pops up like a periscope and Doja assesses me. Slight and athletic, she moves to the middle of the floor and leans forward to grip her toes in a yoga pose, then springs, grasshopper-like, into a makeup chair, puffing on an ice-blue vape and vamping into a mirror studded with light bulbs. I settle into the chair beside her, and ask—over a playlist that has shifted dramatically from a Heidi Montag deep cut to a gloriously sleazy track by the X-rated British rapper Ceechynaa—how her afternoon was. “I caught chlamydia, syphilis, gonorrhea, and herpes,” she deadpans, flicking on a tabletop humidifier that releases a theatrical pump of fog. Sounds busy? “Oh yes,” she replies. “A very busy day.”
It’s a few weeks before Christmas, and Doja is here in Australia for the fifth (and just-added sixth—due to demand) date of her world tour in support of Vie, her playful, genre-bending fifth album released in September. An artful pastiche of 1980s R&B, pop, and funk—with nods to Prince, Janet Jackson, cock rock, and German punk singer Nina Hagen—the record is a reminder of Doja’s talent for smart (and sometimes silly) lyrics, killer hooks, and the ability to spit a punning verse. Vie has been accompanied by a typically radical Doja reinvention, this time into high-octane ’80s fashion of archival Claude Montana, Yves Saint Laurent, and more. Onstage she’s been wearing blond mullet wigs, power shoulders, animal prints, and kaleidoscopic, smoky eyeshadow that could be straight out of an Antonio Lopez illustration.
Her hairstylist, Jared Henderson—a puckish wig specialist, a.k.a. @JStayReady—prizes a bonnet off her head and begins massaging her scalp. (“Got to hydrate that melon,” he mutters.) Doja leans toward the humidifier; she’s already coming down with something. “Whether it’s the tail end or I have a new thing, I have no idea. But it’s been very….” She pauses to consider the precise term. “Annoying-dot-com.”
Hours later, Doja will blast through a two-hour set in front of 15,000 fans, barely pausing for a sip of water. When she struts up a staircase to belt out “Cards,” Vie’s Minneapolis sound–inflected opening track, the arena erupts. The hits follow: “Kiss Me More,” “Woman,” “Paint the Town Red”—all of which have propelled her to become the third-best-selling female rapper of all time, after Nicki Minaj and Cardi B. (Doja’s tally of 19 Grammy nominations surpasses both.)
Looking around, I notice Doja’s fans are decked out in fluffy cat ears, colorful wigs, and cow ears; the latter a reference to Doja’s breakout 2018 hit, “Mooo!” There are skin-tight leopard-print skirts on the girls and neon crop tops on the boys, all of whom are wearing full-beat makeup. In the upper tiers of the arena, I spot two Gen Z hijabi women enthusiastically singing along to “Tia Tamera” from her debut album, a track that draws a parallel between the twins from Sister, Sister and a much-flaunted part of Doja’s anatomy.
It is the pop performer’s job to give her crowd the time of their lives, even if she’s having a not-so-great time herself. Doja’s command in this area is astonishing. “Adrenaline helps,” she tells me, her unassuming five-foot-three frame hunched over in the makeup chair. “And if anything happens, you can take a steroid. Obviously they’re not great for you. They make you feel like the Hulk. I toughed it out yesterday, and that’s why I feel so shit today.”
Doja plucks a strand of the neon green wig that Henderson has been snipping away from between her teeth. Does she consider what she’s doing right now—and the long stretch of tour dates ahead, taking her all the way to the end of 2026—a pop concert? “I’m not sure exactly what a pop concert is anymore,” she replies, politely calling over her assistant to request a shot of Blue Label whisky. “I’ll have one shot before a show if I’m feeling good…that’s the goal,” she explains. “High spirits and positive thoughts.”
So is that her definition of a great pop concert? Powering through against the odds? “No,” she says, firmly. “I think you can do anything with pop.”
A few weeks later, I speak to one of Doja’s friends and frequent collaborators, the artist SZA. “She does everything at such a high level,” SZA says of Doja. “She emotes at a high level. She performs at a high level. Her precision, her fearlessness, her freedom…. Precision and freedom usually don’t go together, but they do with her.”
You could chalk that fearlessness up, at least in part, to Doja’s unorthodox upbringing. She was born Amala Dlamini (everyone close to her calls her Amala or Ami) to the South African dancer and actor Dumisani Dlamini and Deborah Sawyer, a native New Yorker who worked in graphic design. The two met in the early ’90s when Dlamini had a run performing on Broadway, but after Dlamini returned to South Africa, Sawyer, along with Doja and her brother, moved in with her parents in Westchester County. A few years later, when Doja was six, they moved again—this time to the Santa Monica Mountains to join an ashram led by the jazz musician and spiritual leader Alice Coltrane, where Doja grew up singing Hindu devotionals and performing traditional Indian dance. Suffice it to say, ashram life—strict rules, weekly meditations, modest clothing—was not an easy fit for teenage Doja. Her frustrations eventually led Sawyer to take her family to the more affluent California neighborhood of Oak Park, where Doja dropped out of school at 16, retreating to her bedroom to smoke weed and scour online chat rooms while tentatively rapping over beats she found on YouTube and SoundCloud. “I was agoraphobic, fully,” she recalls. “I couldn’t leave my house.”
To trace Doja Cat’s rise is, in some ways, to chart the tangled and often contentious relationship between the music industry and the internet. In 2012, deep in her hermitic phase, Doja uploaded “So High,” an R&B stoner serenade that lit blogs on fire and led to a deal with Dr. Luke’s Kemosabe Records. (Doja’s association with the imprint is still active, but she hasn’t worked with Dr. Luke—who the musician Kesha would sue in 2014 for sexual assault, battery, and emotional abuse—since 2021.) Doja’s first album, 2018’s Amala, which she later dismissed as being rushed due to label pressure, was released to little fanfare, and so it wasn’t until she self-released the viral “Mooo!” some months later—accompanied by a video of her in a cow-print crop top with french fries up her nose—that she began building an online following. A second album, Hot Pink, arrived in 2019, with a single, “Say So,” that became Doja’s biggest hit—largely thanks to TikTok, where a viral dance challenge made it a global sensation.
There was no barometer for how rapidly her audience was growing. “It was so fucking weird,” she says now. “I was getting offers for talk show performances. I was getting offers for things that I used to watch as a kid.” But she had autonomy for the first time in her life, and a Los Angeles home of her own. “I had money,” she says. “It was nice to have money. It was nice to be able to have an apartment. That was really freeing for me.”
Still, Doja barely gave herself time to enjoy it: In 2021 she released Planet Her, which led to eight Grammy nominations and became one of the best-selling albums of the year. By this point she was feeling restless and rankled by what she perceived as scrutiny of her talent as a rapper. And so, in an act of defiance, she shaved off her hair and eyebrows, tattooed her back with an enormous bat skeleton, and put out 2023’s Scarlet, which included the single “Attention,” a scorching hip-hop track that rails against anyone who might have underestimated her. Was the willfully abrasive sound something she needed to get out of her system? “I think that’s correct,” she says.
Vie came on the heels of another reset. Doja took a moment—for the first time in her breakneck career—to retreat to the LA suburbs to enjoy, she says, “being a hermit,” drinking wine, playing Fortnite, and scrolling the internet to build a catalog of inspiration. She’s come to recognize these hibernation phases as a way to look after herself. “Restimulating my creative bone,” is how she puts it. “When I’m home, I’m just home with my cat,” she says, describing the environment as “lots of black, lots of gothic things, lots of iron, little bit of Brutalist, a little bit industrial, a little bit postmodern Italian.”
“She’s actually a very solitary star,” SZA notes. “I think by choice, she shields certain aspects of herself. And when it’s her choice to reveal those, I think that’ll be a gift.” It’s a trait that has always been there, her mom tells me over the phone: “She just was so creative—whatever she put her hands on, she would master it,” Sawyer recalls of Doja’s reclusive teenage years, when her daughter discovered the art of songwriting and music production from her bedroom. “She taught herself all of these things from scratch. She was in the room, door closed, constantly creating.”
It is perhaps no surprise that Doja is most comfortable inside a tight-knit entourage. That would include her managers, Gordan Dillard and Josh Kaplan, as well as the impish, diamond-earringed Brett Alan Nelson—her creative director since 2019 (“My best friend and sister,” Nelson says. “I would jump in front of a car for her”)—and a few others in her glam squad. When I ask Doja who she hangs out with when she’s back at home, she offers a guilty smile and points to Henderson. “My favorite days are when you would be like, ‘Come over. I want to dress up.’ ” Henderson laughs while rummaging through a bag full of hair pieces: “You’re the only person that I drive all the way up the 101 for.”
“I’m very, very lucky to have the team that I have, and to have people that understand me, and also understand themselves,” Doja says. The next day this gang is off to Sydney’s Taronga Zoo to meet the koalas. “We don’t all talk the same. We all dress completely differently, but we love each other so deeply. I think it’s because we appreciate those differences,” she says, before stealing the makeup brush from the hand of her traveling beauty guru, Ivan Núñez, and beginning to paint in her own eye shadow.
The plan that day had been for me to join Doja for a morning workout at her hotel. Deeming herself too sick to train, she suggests we go shopping instead—at Mecca, her favorite Australian beauty store. “Sephora on steroids,” she tells me, heading out of the hotel into the baking sun of the Australian summer, dressed in a leather jacket, ruffle skirt, a dancer’s headband pushing back a curly black wig, and a bag from The Row slung over her shoulder. Doja bundles me into the car, trilling that “we can be the naughty kids” at the back of the bus, before offering me one of her anesthetic throat lozenges and launching straight into recounting her nightmare of swallowing a worm.
As soon as we arrive at the store, though, the mood shifts. Doja—cheerfully depositing Mario Badescu face mists into her basket—spots someone taking a photo from afar, and visibly seizes up. Her security team ushers us to the store’s quieter upper floor, where she proffers a test strip of a fragrance called Drunk Lovers in my direction—a boozy scent of cognac and berries, not my thing—but it’s clear the attention has rattled her. (She briefly lights up, however, when spotting a ladybug on a windowsill and encourages it to crawl onto her talon-like acrylic nail: “Oh my God, helloooo!”) “It’s when you want to do things, just regular mundane shit,” she’ll tell me later, “and people feel they’re owed a photo, or your attention, or your smile, a disposition from you. That is the most fascinating part of it for me personally.”
Other stars might have simply paid to shut down the store for an hour. But there was something about her excitement on the way there—and her disappointment as the situation unfolded—that suggested Doja still craves the experience of being able to shop like a normal person. “Yeah, 100%,” she says. “It makes me so upset. Will I go up to somebody and be like, ‘Stop fucking filming me,’ and cuss them out? No, I’m not going to do that. I don’t want to do that. I think I would rather do it in a creative way.” What’s a creative way? “Sometimes I try to look purposefully ugly. I turn it into a game,” she says. As if to demonstrate her point, she will leave her hotel later that day in a bright red bonnet, pulling a deliberately unflattering face for the paparazzi.
Doja’s relationship with her fans (the “Kittenz”) has been famously complicated—they’ve often felt an unusual level of intimacy with her, a parasocial bond that has been fostered in part by Doja’s love of TikTok or Twitch livestreams. But she’s fiercely pushed back at times, infamously in 2023, when she issued a series of now deleted messages denigrating them: “If you call yourself a ‘kitten’ or ‘kittenz’ that means you need to get off your phone and get a job and help your parents with the house,” she wrote on Threads. The tirade lost her half a million followers, but she said afterward that she felt “free.”
A similar brouhaha erupted in Auckland just after the first night of the Vie tour. A vocal minority of fans criticized the lack of costume changes during the show. (Doja performs the entire show in a single look—a different one every night.) She responded on X, declaring that she was “not a Broadway act,” and reminded her fans: “You are not the artist, you are the watcher.” She’s since deleted X, she tells me, and its “cesspool of negativity” from her phone.
Why go there in the first place, then? “Well, that’s the question I’ve been waiting for,” she sighs. “When I feel that I’m threatened, even though it may not be a threat at all, it rhymes with: You are failing.” She pauses to weigh her thoughts. “Look, I never do costume changes, but I feel like I have to defend my creative choices, and then I give those people power even though they could be anybody—they could have Cheeto dust on their fingers and have no job.”
Someday she’ll stop this cycle of activating and then fleeing from her own insecurities and vulnerabilities. “I don’t know. In life, you grow. We’ll see where I am when I’m 50, if I’m still on Twitter doing stuff like that, who knows?” A gentle chuckle. “Hopefully not.” I note that there are thousands of comments praising her performances every night. Does she go on social media to purposefully seek out criticism? “Artists in general…we can be quite critical of ourselves,” she admits. Seeing a comment critiquing something she’d already harbored insecurities about—“that’s a moment of, See, I was right.”
That doesn’t sound very healthy, I say, as empathetically as I can. “Obviously not, but it’s validating,” she says, turning from her makeup mirror to look at me directly. “You feel you’re more in control in a sense. ‘I’ve got it all figured out. I can’t sing. I’ve got it all figured out. I am ugly. I got it all figured out. I got cankles.’ ” Her glam team laughs. “It’s a useless way to spend your time. It doesn’t do anything for you other than entertain a part of you that was built during your childhood, a part of you that is stuck in the past.”
Therapy, which she began during the Scarlet album cycle, has helped. “I’m not cured of anything,” she says. “But it helps me understand why I do the things that I do.” (In early March, she spoke on TikTok about “struggling with BPD,” or borderline personality disorder. “I am so relieved and so proud of myself,” she said. “I’ve made it so far, and I still make mistakes.”) In fact, Doja tells me, if she weren’t a musician, she’d be a psychologist: “I think the human mind is just so complex and fascinating and beautiful and chaotic.”
Another positive to come out of therapy is the impetus to look after her voice. Ahead of recording Vie, she began working with a vocal coach for the first time, and you can hear it on the anthemic chorus of “Jealous Type” or in the velvety-soft verses of “All Mine.” She’s had to learn to curb some of her more indulgent habits to get there. “I love trash—I’m Oscar the Grouch,” she grins. “I love to eat garbage, and I love to drink, and I love to party. Not too hard, obviously…. I don’t do any drugs.”
As Nelson describes it, the shift from Scarlet’s righteous fury to Vie’s romantic air says a lot about what’s changed in Doja’s life over the past two years. “This [album] is so much about love and not about the men, right?” says Nelson. “Obviously songs are written about relationships and people she’s been in love with, but at the soul of it is her. And you can tell that she’s falling in love with herself even more every single day.”
On the subject of love and relationships: She’s described herself in the past as a “serial dater.” Is that still the case? “Yes,” Doja says firmly. “I’m 30, so I’m ovulating and horny.” She was most recently linked to actor Joseph Quinn—though she won’t tell me who her current paramour is, even while admitting he’s planning to fly out to visit her on tour. Her favorite part of her current relationship? “I love when they leave.” She insists that’s healthy. “This is what therapy has done for me. It’s allowed me to be away and be at peace without being like, ‘I need tarot cards. I need an answer. Text me.’ I don’t do any of that anymore. It’s very nice.”
If there’s a subject that makes Doja visibly brighten—more than music, more than dating, more, even, than spotting a ladybug in a beauty store—it’s fashion. (When I ask how far into the songwriting process she starts thinking about the looks, her glam team bursts into laughter: “Immediately,” Núñez says. “Before she’s written the second song,” says Nelson.) “I think that one of my strong suits is world-building, and I do that really, really fast,” she explains. As for what she’s wearing on the Vie tour: “Some days I look very formal and less manic, and it’s beautiful jewels, and suiting, and structure, and things like that. Or it’s bras, and sex, and mania, and psychopathy.”
Directly next to Doja’s underground boudoir at the arena in Sydney was a separate, equally spacious room where rails of metallic lamé bodysuits jostled against iridescent neon and zebra print jackets. Trestle tables were topped with fascinators, costume jewelry, and belts in every shade, all arranged to be styled on the fly. “I think it makes the show stronger, and it makes me feel stronger inside,” Doja says of assembling new outfits each night.
Off-tour, Doja’s most outlandish looks—the 30,000 Pat McGrath–applied red crystals she wore to a 2023 Schiaparelli couture show in Paris; the Oscar de la Renta cat look, combined with prosthetics, she wore to the Met Gala that same year; the nipple-exposing sheer Dilara Findikoglu corset she wore to the 2024 Grammys, complete with the designer’s name tattooed across her forehead—have given her a reputation as a provocateur.
The truth is, Doja simply knows fashion. In her video for Vie single “Gorgeous,” she faithfully re-creates an ’80s TV beauty spot wearing vintage Mugler, with the help of Anok Yai, Alex Consani, Paloma Elsesser, and, in an especially delightful cameo, her mom. Nelson recounts a beloved anecdote: When Doja attended the Schiaparelli show wearing that head-to-toe crystal look, she was alerted to fans complaining online about her lack of false lashes. So the next day, while getting ready for a Viktor & Rolf show, she decided to step out with lashes applied to her face as a mustache and goatee. “She has no limits,” Nelson says, with a touch of awe. “She’s always down to try new things. She keeps me on my toes.”
“Her talent is mind-blowing, and she has such a big heart—I love her,” says Donatella Versace, who has twice dressed Doja in custom looks for the Grammys. “She understands her body and what suits her and the power of clothes. For me, she represents exactly the woman I love to dress.” It’s a sentiment echoed by Marc Jacobs, who designed an animal print crystal-studded bodysuit for the 2025 Met Gala, a look that kicked off the Vie era.“Doja is someone who knows exactly what she wants,” Jacobs says. “She came with references, mood boards, and really considered feedback…while never shying away from trying something the team suggested. And she can pull off a look like no one else.”
It’s worth noting that she showed up for her Vogue fitting in immaculate Jil Sander, before dashing off to visit The Row. These are the labels she’s gravitating toward: Phoebe Philo, Khaite, Proenza Schouler. “I think it’s made me feel safer,” she says of more subdued looks, with subtle details of color and fabric and fit. “It’s just as exciting as when I was wearing cat ears and go-go boots and crazy, silly, whimsical stuff.”
When I catch up with Doja again in January, at home in Los Angeles, where she’s been enjoying some downtime—“changing litter boxes and unpacking Amazon packages and readjusting planters”—she seems fully recharged. “In order to do things, I have to do nothing for an amount of time.” What does doing nothing look like? “Vacuuming and cleaning…and doing a little spa treatment”—meaning colloidal oatmeal in the bathtub and gommage peels, both of which help to “get all of the tour soot and crap off of me.”
The next morning, she’ll fly to Latin America for the next leg of the tour. True to her word, she hasn’t redownloaded X—and for this, she again credits therapy: “I don’t know what I would’ve done without it or where I’d be without it,” she says. “I’ve been able to see through a lot of the fog that I couldn’t see through before.” I mention that her friends have told me she seems happier and more grounded than ever. “I don’t want to be in a state of agony before a show,” she says. “I don’t want to be exhausted. I don’t want to be unhealthy. And physically, mentally…I need all of the education I can get on how to do that.” She pauses, then breaks into a serene smile. “I’m glad that people are noticing.”
The tour will proceed to the UK and Europe and then North America, finally wrapping up at Madison Square Garden in December 2026. “We’ve got a lot of fun ideas that I can’t spoil at the moment,” she says of the dates to come. And there’s another project on its way—it will either be a deluxe version of Vie, or its own EP—that she hopes will surprise people. (She teases it as “bubbly” and “futuristic”-sounding.) She plans to keep taking risks onstage, even if they don’t always land. “I think because I’ve already dealt with embarrassment for so long, it’s become my best friend. And so anytime I can utilize an embarrassing moment, whether it be intentional or not, it’s just an opportunity.” I think of something she told me in Sydney—that the most important thing was to constantly find challenges, in whatever form they took. “Falling is an opportunity,” she says now. “Failing is an opportunity.”
In this story: hair, Mustafa Yanaz; makeup, Aaron de Mey; manicurist, Dawn Sterling; tailor, Jacqui for Carol Ai Studio Tailors.
Produced by One Thirty-Eight Productions.
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