Dua Lipa at 31: Music, Fashion and a Life Beyond Pop

Dua Lipa turns 31 on August 22 with the kind of résumé that makes 31 sound unexpectedly accomplished: three Grammys, a Glastonbury headline set, a global tour, her own cultural platform, a book club, a music festival in Prishtina and, as of this summer, a husband. Somewhere in between, she also found time to design a Versace collection. 

The story began in London, where Lipa was born in 1995 to Kosovo Albanian parents. Music was already part of the family: her father, Dukagjin Lipa, had been a musician himself. When Dua was 11, the family moved to Prishtina. Four years later, she made a rather ambitious teenage decision and returned to London, staying with a family friend while trying to build a career in music. 

Before stadiums, there were YouTube covers. Lipa uploaded versions of songs by artists including Alicia Keys and Christina Aguilera, modeled and worked restaurant shifts while trying to find her way into the music industry. At one point, her routine involved working, going out until the early hours and then heading into the studio before the next shift. It was considerably less glamorous than the pop-star life that followed. 

Then came „New Rules“. 

Released on her first album in 2017, the song gave Lipa her first UK number one and became the first single by a solo female artist to top the British chart in almost two years. More importantly, it established the formula that would become unmistakably hers: pop made for dancing, very clear rules about bad relationships and a visual identity strong enough to survive hundreds of millions of screens. 

Her second album arrived under far stranger circumstances. „Future Nostalgia“ was released in 2020, just as much of the world was going into lockdown.

An album built around dance floors suddenly arrived when there were no dance floors to go to, yet that contradiction somehow worked in its favor. The record received six Grammy nominations and won Best Pop Vocal Album. By then Lipa had moved well beyond promising newcomer status and into the much smaller category of pop stars who could build an entire era around a sound, wardrobe and mood. 

By 2024 she was headlining Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage, a particularly neat achievement considering she had once returned to London at 15 simply hoping to find a way into music.

That same year she released her third album, „Radical Optimism“, built around a lighter psychedelic-pop sound and the idea of moving through difficult situations without becoming consumed by them. 

The tour that followed also showed something slightly unexpected about Lipa. During the 2025 Radical Optimism Tour, she decided to perform a different song by a local artist in each city. What began as an ambitious idea became a 92-show habit. Across the tour she sang covers in nine languages and brought artists including Gwen Stefani, Lenny Kravitz and Ben Gibbard onstage. It was a clever way of making a stadium tour feel specific to wherever she happened to be that night. 

Fashion has developed alongside the music rather than sitting somewhere beside it. Lipa has long been a red-carpet regular, but in 2023 she moved from wearing Versace to actually designing it. Together with Donatella Versace, she created the La Vacanza collection, which debuted on the French Riviera and included everything from tailoring and evening dresses to bikinis and beachwear.

Still, one of the more interesting things about Dua Lipa at 31 is that music and fashion no longer explain the whole picture.

In 2022 she launched Service95, a platform built around culture, travel, books, style and recommendations. A year later came the Service95 Book Club. It has now been running for three years, with Lipa selecting monthly reads and interviewing authors herself. For someone whose public image could easily survive on songs, clothes and holiday photographs alone, her insistence on talking about books is one of the more appealing parts of the brand she has built around herself. 

Then there is Prishtina.

Lipa spent four formative years there as a child and has repeatedly described the city as home. Together with her family, she is behind Sunny Hill Festival, which began in 2018 and has grown into one of Southeast Europe’s major music events. The original idea was simple: when Lipa lived in Prishtina, international artists rarely came to perform there. Sunny Hill was created partly to change that and partly to give local talent access to a much larger stage. 

That relationship with Kosovo became official in 2025, when she was granted citizenship by presidential decree. By the 2026 edition of Sunny Hill, the festival was also drawing thousands of visitors to Prishtina and had become part of the city’s international cultural identity. 

Her personal life has changed too. Earlier this summer, Lipa married British actor Callum Turner in London, followed by wedding celebrations in Sicily. The two had been linked since early 2024 and became engaged before marrying in 2026. 

There is an interesting consistency to all of this. Lipa’s career has become enormous, but she has kept adding projects that are surprisingly specific to what she actually likes: dancing, fashion, reading, traveling, restaurants, books and Prishtina. Even on a 92-date world tour, she somehow turned discovering local music into part of the job.

At 31, Dua Lipa is obviously still a pop star. She just seems increasingly uninterested in being only that.