LAST month GQ magazine ran an article on the pop star Dua Lipa, who recently made history by becoming the most nominated female artist at the Brits and, with New Rules, was the most streamed artist of 2017. “Meet the Madonna of Generation Z,” it declared. The statement triggered a reaction. Some thought it over-hype and even joked the suggestion was an “April Fool”. But the fact remains that Lipa is certainly the voice of the moment. Her latest single, One Kiss, a collaboration with Calvin Harris, looks set to be one of the big sounds of the summer, a hypnotic dance track, made all the more irresistible by Lipa's deep, languorous and effortless vocals.

She is also is an artist that, like Madonna and others before her, seems to resonate with a cultural moment, and say something about female empowerment now. Many young women read the GQ article and discussed it. Among them was 17-year-old Iona Allan, who went to the singer’s Glasgow concert: “I think she is a feminist icon. All her songs are about girl power. I liked what she said about sexism in the music industry and how she doesn’t take it. I respect her a lot.”

Nathalie Hollede, a student at the University of Stirling and blogger, also went to that concert. For her, she says, what she finds so relatable in Lipa’s music is her attitude to “vulnerability”. "It holds such an important message to me as a woman. I think it is instrumental that we as women, and humans, feel that our emotions are not a weakness, but rather an advantage. Dua Lipa’s lyrics bring us together like sisters, binding us by our common struggles that come with our common nature. The courage to be both strong and vulnerable is what Dua Lipa as an individual, woman, and artist, seems to embrace, which makes me feel like I know her, and like I am her."

New Rules, coming as it did in the year of the #MeToo movement, became a sisterhood anthem of sorts. No men appeared in the video. Lipa’s low register battle-worn vocals seemed to resonate with something about the #MeToo moment – a feeling that enough was enough, things had gone on too long, women had been pushed to their limits. Now was the time for some new rules.

"I wanted it to be about the rules you would tell your girlfriends," Lipa said of the song. "I think sisterhood is really important. It’s really important to take care of the girls around you and keep your friends close."

Lipa didn’t write that song herself. In fact, it was written for and rejected by a series of other artists, including Little Mix, before it came to her. But, the sweary, defiant songs she has written, IDGAF, which uses the “I don’t give a f***” expression that became a battle cry of feminists back in 2014, and Blow Your Mind (Mwah), express ample anger and defiance.

The feminism of pop icons speaks volumes about the period they flourish in. Madonna was an 80s phenomenon, thrown up in the Reagan and Thatcher years, and there was very little sisterhood about her. Her feminism was simply about being who you are. As Homa Khaleeli, writing in The Guardian, has put it, Madonna "inspires not because she gives other women a helping hand, but because she breaks the boundaries of what's considered acceptable for women”. The Spice Girls were about Girl Power, having each other’s backs and getting what you “really, really want”. With Lipa we have a feminism that seems more about sisterhood than anything else.

Lipa has also not been shy about making a few feminist pronouncements. In a Brit awards speech, earlier this year, she said: "I want to thank every single female who's been on this stage before me that has given girls like me – not just girls in the music industry but girls in society – a place to be inspired by, to look up to, and that have allowed us to dream this big. Here's to more women on these stages, more women winning awards and more women taking over the world."

The speech was very much part of a world view. She told Glamour magazine that the future of pop music is female. In that interview with GQ, she struck out against the sexism in her industry and cultural perceptions about music. "For a female artist, it takes a lot more to be taken seriously if you’re not sat down at a piano or with a guitar, you know? ... For a male artist, people instantly assume they write their own music, but for women, they assume it’s all manufactured.”

One of the problems with feminism in pop is that it has now become a form of branding. The last few years have seen the word feminist go from being one that was anathema to the mainstream star, to almost a requirement, and that shift really began when Beyonce stood up on a stage with the word "feminist" spelled out in big bright letters behind her.

At the same time, however, the music industry remains challenging for women. Though Lipa’s videos are frequently free of men and populated by a sisterhood of multi-ethnic performers, unsurprisingly, behind the scenes in the production of her music and brand, men are everywhere. It’s men who made those videos, men who produced the music, even a man, Lorenzo Posocco, who is her stylist. Yes, women, Lipa herself in particular, are writing many of the songs, but on the long list of over 50 credits on the liner notes for the Dua Lipa album, only four, apart from the woman herself, are women. That’s not to take away from Lipa’s own achievements, or suggest that she’s manufactured – it’s just to observe the way the industry is.

This is the backdrop to much of the sisterhood pop that we listen to. It’s what American activist and writer Janet Mock was observing in 2016 when she commented on the fact that when Taylor Swift won her Grammy, she went up on stage with a bunch of men. "The first woman to win album of the year twice but no women producers standing behind you."

Young women know this. Many of them understand the state of the industry and the way the consumerist world works. Hence, not all young women are convinced that Dua Lipa really is a feminist icon. One 16-year-old, for instance, said: “You can’t be a pop star and be feminist. It’s just not realistic.”

Whether pop is impregnable to feminism or not, however, Lipa brings a feminist message to it. As Nathalie Hollede puts it: “All of the values she communicates through her social media, and her music are so female empowering that you can’t think otherwise. She seems like the kind of feminist that is easy-going, and wants everyone to get along in real life.”

What Hollede believes Lipa communicates is that women don’t have to hate men, “but we do have to love ourselves more”. “Us women can play an active role in preventing gender inequality by self-acceptance, is what she is saying to me through her music, and that’s an important message to us about feminism.”

Get the Dua Lipa look

The world is starting to look a bit like Dua Lipa. That doesn’t’ quite mean that we’re living in a version of her IDGAF video in which everyone is a kind of Lipa clone, wearing wide-legged suits and trainers. What it means is that there’s a Lipa-like look that many young women are adopting. Some of these are zeitgeist looks – the dark-accentuated eyebrows, the 90s nostalgia, the yellowed sunglasses. But some of them are directly inspired by the singer herself. The bra top and wide legged trousers is her signature concert look. Mwah chokers are all hers.

17-year-old Iona Allan is a fan of her style. When she went to the concert earlier this year, she recalls, she decided to wear her wide-legged jogger trousers, since this was part of the Dua Lipa look. “When I got there I saw about five girls just in the stand I was in and they were in the exact same joggers as me.”

So how do you get the Lipa Look? One, think back to the 1990s. Think of rave fashion, platform boots, chokers and leotards. Drew Barrymore, Kate Moss and Chloe Sevigny, are all icons she has said have been her inspiration. Two, you can also rock the odd suit jacket, with shoulder-pads and pinstripes. Three, whatever you do, you’re doing it for your sisters, not that guy for whom you really shouldn’t pick up the phone.

Who is she?

Dua means “love” in Albanian and art of Lipa’s appeal is her family story – the fact that she, like so many in these immigrant-wary times, is the product of immigration and conflict. The 22 year old is the daughter of Kosovan-Albanian parents, who came to London in the 1990s, fleeing the war in their homeland. Her father, Dukagjin Lipa, was a Kosovan rock star, and the son of a well-known historian, Seit Lipa. Dua Lipa,has spoken about the abrupt end of her grandfather’s career in history at the start of the war,: “Once the Serbians came in, they wanted a lot of the historians to rewrite the history of Kosovo. To change it – that Kosovo was always part of Serbia and never part of Yugoslavia. And my grandfather was one of those people who wouldn’t, so he lost his job, because he didn’t want to write a history that he didn’t believe to be true.”

When the war started Dukagjin was living with her mother, Anesa, in Kosovo. They fled to London, though her grandparents stayed. Seit Seit Lipa died during the war, while the borders were closed, so her father never got to go back and see him.

As a child she watched her parents, who had been training to be a dentist and a lawyer before leaving Kosovo, have to work hard, as immigrants, to adapt, waiting in cafes and bars, taking business courses and retraining. “While I was going to school,” she has said, “they were going to school.”

Such a work ethic is very much part of who she is. “I’ve seen my parents work every day of my life,” she has said.

When she was 11 years old, it was announced that her father had a job in marketing in Pristina and that they were going back to Kosovo. It was there that the singer first got into American hip-hop, an influence which she blended with her first musical love, the pop of Pink, Nelly Furtado and Katy Perry. But Lipa already, at a young age, had the conviction that London was where she needed to be to launch her career. At 15, she headed back to London on her own, without her parents, to do her GCSEs and pursue that goal. It was while she was studying for A-levels in Politics, Psychology, English and Media, that she began putting out cover versions on You Tube. From these she got a management deal with TAP, which represented Lana del Rey.