Lady Gaga's column will appear in V's summer issue.

EVER since Lady Gaga announced in March that she would be writing a fashion and art column for V magazine, you may have asked, what exactly does Lady Gaga know about fashion and art?

Her outrageous style is well documented. She has served as a mascot for the house of Mugler, and she will receive an icon award in June from the Council of Fashion Designers of America. But if these were qualifications for magazine work, Cher should have been named the editor of Harper’s Bazaar decades ago.

Nevertheless, when Gaga e-mailed Stephen Gan, the editor in chief of V, asking for the job, he gave her a shot.

“She’s got a lot to say,” he said. “She’s got her own very personal, very special viewpoint that comes from a well-informed place. She is almost Vreeland-esque in her analysis and critique of fashion.”

In her debut column in V’s summer issue, Gaga takes pains (in 1,445 words and two footnotes) to establish her credentials: “I myself can look at almost any hemline, silhouette, beadwork or heel architecture and tell you very precisely who designed it first, what French painter they stole it from, how many designers reinvented it after them and what cultural and musical movement parented the birth, death and resurrection of that particular trend,” she writes.

Props!

Gaga sheds light on some of her crazier outfits and addresses that persistent brickbat that she is only copying whatever Madonna did 20 years ago. To summarize what she has to say, all artists reinterpret the past. Think of the appropriation of ideas by Picasso and Matisse, she reminds us, and the Mondrian painting by Yves Saint Laurent. Her references, too, are quite intentional. Her disco ball dress was inspired by a scuba suit covered in mirrors that the glam-rock pioneer Marc Bolan wore.

“Art gives birth to new art,” she writes. “There is no chicken or egg.” Except for that Hussein Chalayan egg costume she wore to the Grammy Awards, which she explains was a metaphor for birth and rebirth. She totally blew my mind with this nugget: “The past undergoes mitosis, becoming the originality of the future.”

Best of all, Mr. Gan said, Gaga required very little editing.