On Tour · Lady Gaga
For Lady Gaga's ArtRave: The ARTPOP Ball world tour, Vex designed and built custom inflatable latex pieces for Gaga and her dancers — wearable sculpture engineered to perform under arena lighting, night after night, across continents.
The ArtRave: The ARTPOP Ball wasn't a concert so much as a travelling art installation. When Gaga's production team needed custom inflatable pieces that could function as both wearable garment and visual spectacle, they came to Vex. Every inflatable was designed from scratch in our California studio — conceived as wearable sculpture that had to hold its form and impact across dozens of tour dates, under each show's specific lighting and choreography.
Custom Vex inflatable, built for the ArtRave: The ARTPOP Ball world tour.
ARTPOP era
On stage, the custom Vex pieces became part of the ARTPOP visual language — sculptural, surreal, and unmistakably Gaga.
Lady Gaga in custom Vex during the ARTPOP era.
The commission wasn't limited to Gaga herself. Vex built inflatable pieces for her dancers too — each made to their measurements and engineered around the exact movements the choreography demanded. When multiple performers wear custom inflatables on stage at once, every piece has to match in construction, inflation behaviour and visual impact. There's no room for variation.
Left: dancers in custom Vex inflatables. Right: inflatable detail, fabricated in California.
A touring production is the hardest environment a garment will ever face — the same piece has to perform perfectly in a different arena every night, in different climates, for months. The ArtRave inflatables had to inflate consistently, hold their sculptural form under stage lighting, survive live choreography, and endure being packed and unpacked across a global schedule. Every seam and material choice was made with that reality in mind.
Handmade latex for the world's biggest stages. Tell us what you need — we'll build it.
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