Quick! What do Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and Nicki Minaj all have in common?

                Answer: they all dress with a voice.

Pioneered by the fearless Gaga, this trend has become immensely popular over the last two years. But how far is too far with crazy copycat dressing?

                If we were on Broadway, I might enjoy the various outfits Katy Perry dons. But for everyday life, she’s gone overboard. Lady Gaga has rights to the trend, but even she can go too far sometimes. Minaj can just put away her costumes—she looks horrible in a pink wig.

                “They look like idiots,” says senior Peter Sawall matter-of-factly. “They have no sense of who they are, and it is annoying that they think they can dress like that.”

                Where did the classic, old-school glamour go? The simple-yet-stylish makeup and clothing that the ladies of the fifties wore is still embodied today in talented women like Adele and Emma Watson. They wear effortless, stylish dresses without looking fake. People admire their simplicity, not their outfit. 

But there are also starlets who feel the need to stand out. I can only see two reasons for this: 1) they feel they need to look crazy to be noticed or 2) they feel more beautiful in something unconventional.

“I think they dress the way they do to make up for the talent they know they don’t have,” says junior Brenda Suhan.

Even though I respect their choices, I also don’t see why everyone has to dress like this. Once Lady Gaga started dressing differently, everyone else followed. Now, people dress so outrageously that others need to top it just to be recognized. This creates a never ending cycle of bad outfits no one appreciates anymore. There are so many, we just wince and look the other way.

Take Minaj at the Grammys, for example. She wore a gaudy red dress with a cape and hood, completed with an embroidered face. Honestly, who thinks that looks good? She at least kept her hair in check with her usual blond wig, but still…The fact that she shows up in an awful dress like that and not get gawked at makes me cringe.

Even Perry is slowly melding back into the realm of normality. She dyed her hair blue to match her pastel blue dress (which is awful, don’t get me wrong), but at least she tamed her outfit to match the seriousness of the occasion. Lady Gaga did the same, wearing an all-black ensemble with face netting being her most outrageous feature.

“I like that the way they dress can let young people know it’s okay to be yourself,” says junior Karissa Olsen of Lady Gaga and Perry. “But Nicki Minaj just needs to cover up.”

When people like Minaj can come to the Grammys in a horrible dress, then something needs to be fixed.