The 'Unstoppable Rise' of Dua Lipa by Emma Summerton in Vogue UK February 2021

English singer and songwriter Dua Lipa, who received six Grammy nominations on Nov. 24, strikes a sexy pose on the cover of British Vogue’s February 2021, styled by Kate Phelan. Photographer Emma Summerton [IG] is in the house, using the same “journeying through many different characters” technique employed in Brigit Kos’ Vogue Poland January 2021 cover story, by Sonia Szostak. / Hair by Shon; makeup by Lisa Eldridge

Guardian columnist Yomi Adegoke conducts the interview: “I’m Always Like, ‘OK, What’s Next?’”: The Unstoppable Rise Of Dua Lipa

The singer spent the Christmas holidays with boyfriend Anwar Hadid, his sisters Bella and Gigi Hadid, Zayn Malik and their new baby girl. Mom Yolanda ran the holiday show at the family’s Bucks County home down the road near Carversville.

Lipa also closed out the season for Saturday Night Live 2020, performing ‘Don’t Start Now’ and ‘Levitating’.

The star’s Thanksgiving-weekend Studio 2054 livestream was a smashing success, creating a new model for livestreams. The show cost about $1.5 million to create and took five months to assemble, while attracting five million viewers, says Lipa’s management company team TaP Music.

“Even when touring comes back, I think this’ll be part of the new model,” Ben Mawson, co-founder and co-CEO of TaP told Rolling Stone. “It’s a new creative form for live, and when it’s done right like I think Dua did, it works well. We’ll definitely do it again — when, we don’t know. Certainly for the rest of our artists, we’ll do more.”

Dua Lipa parents fled Pristina, Kosovo in 1992, driven out by the orders of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. Her parents arrived as refugees in London, where Dua was born. In Kosovo, her father was studying to be a dentist, her mother to be a lawyer. Both found jobs as waiters in the UK, while acquiring new skills in business, travel and tourism. Dua arrived in Kosovo for the first time in 2006, when her family returned. Lipa is deeply troubled by anti-immigration rhetoric, telling British Vogue: “People don’t leave their home country unless they have to a lot of the time,” she says. “To save their families, to try and get a better life. People want to be where their family is, where their home is, where they speak the language that is native to them, where they have their own culture.”

Recognizing that Lipa’s own roots were now in Britain, the 15-year-old “convinced her parents to let her move back to Britain alone, to follow her dream of performing. They agreed, primarily because of the opportunities in the arts in the UK – something Dua hopes to provide in her homeland through the Sunny Hill Foundation, which she set up with her father.”