Lady Gaga Covers CR Fashion Book / Talks Breaking Free Musically

Pop titan Lady Gaga continues her image renaissance ahead of her hotly anticipated comeback.

The ‘Bad Romance’ belter appears on the double cover of CR Fashion Book‘s latest issue – sans any retouching.

Speaking on the Gaga’s selection, the publication’s creator Carine Roitfeld explained:

“Lady Gaga perfectly represents what I mean by the classic eccentric to me. She is completely Gaga, but she is also a lady. In her music and art, she is so creative, always pushing the envelope . . . And yet she is classically trained, as well. As we saw with the jazz music, she can be both the modern pop star and still play the classic songs, giving them a modern twist. That is always what I love.”

She elaborated on the singer’s appearance as a bride on the covers:

“I decided to style her in that way for two reasons: The obvious one, of course, is that she is getting married soon, but also it represents how in this new era in her career, how she has come to marry these different sides of herself—how she has become free.”

Gaga herself chimed in about being musically liberated – thanks largely to ‘Cheek to Cheek,’ her Grammy winning Jazz album with Tony Bennett.

See what she said below…

“Some people think about music and they think pop, rock, rap, and hip-hop, and they just list them off like categories, but music deserves the same freedom that a fine artist would have with paint—no rules, a blank canvas. That’s jazz. It was totally what I needed at a moment in my career when I felt like a caged animal. And I knew I could do so much more outside of that cage than inside”

The edgy shoot arrives as the 29-year-old superstar pieces together the follow-up to 2013’s ‘ARTPOP’ and prepares to flex her acting muscles in ‘American Horror Story: Hotel.’