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My appreciation for Lady Gaga’s act is simple: I like her insistent awkwardness. She is an ugly duckling with great spook appeal, in a long tradition of such women (for the best of them, consult Cecil Beaton’s “Glass of Fashion”). I like that she not only appreciates hats but understands the boundaries a hat and veil impose on other people, a point she discussed in a recent interview on showstudio.com. As many of you know, she wore a veil this week to her sister’s high school graduation from the Convent of the Sacred Heart. Was it a “slap in the face” to the school, as some columns have said, or a way of saying, “You can’t touch me”?

And I like that Gaga continues to explore style (with the help of the stylist Nicola Formichetti), whether she is backtracking through Madonna country or making more abstract connections to art and film. Her pale stick of a figure refutes the contemporary obsession with perfect bodies, at the very least.

The “Alejandro” video, directed by Steven Klein, seems to bring out the prude in people, or maybe they’re watching too much Fox News. The lighting in particular seems consistent with Mr. Klein’s photographs; in any case his images have explored similar themes. If you want real outrage, go back to the ’90s, and the shows of Jean Paul Gaultier and Rei Kawakubo, to mention only two designers who agitated people. But, as Holly Brubach said in a piece in April 1995 in The Times Magazine, referring to Ms. Kawakubo’s men’s collection of striped pajamas worn with sweaters and jackets — and the complaint that she was alluding to the Holocaust — “Some of the most irate objections have been lodged by people who have never seen the clothes.” Ms. Brubach went on to say that moral indignation “hijacks any discourse that the clothes might have inspired.” Sometimes it just helps to have a little more information.