Lady Gaga's October ELLE cover has dropped and she offers a one-eyed stare.

The image is high fashion, even though most of her face and outfit are the things you don't see. So it leaves much to the imagination. Gaga has a pink, raccoon fur hat on her head –call PETA — and is wearing a poufy-sleeved outfit.

Wanna know how Gaga handles pressure? Like an Italian stallion, that's how.

"What are you talking about, pressure? I'm great under pressure. I'm a warrior. I'm Rocky, round 12," she said when asked how she deals. She's treading on Katy Perry turf with the boxer metaphor, but Rocky was the Italian stallion and so is Gaga!

The Mother Monster also addressed the prevailing notion that she grew up with a silver spoon stuffed in her mouth. "Everyone is so cynical—that I can't purely love my fans, or share an honest story about my past, without someone asking me if I really, truly struggled," she groused. "Do you know how much dirt I ate? Do you know the men I had to crawl through, the people that disrespected my body, my mind, my heart?"

We believer her – wholeheartedly.

Ma Monster also said that she spent her time on a forced hiatus while healing from her hip injury wisely. She thought about how Stefani Germanotta or Gaga of several years ago would do things, admitting, "I went to look back to myself being 19, with all my Warhol books and all my Yoko Ono and John Lennon CDs, my Rolling Stones CDs and my Bowie…, and I said, 'What would she want me to do right now? Well she'd want you to call Jeff Koons and Robert Wilson and Marina Abramović and Inez and Vinoodh.' And that's what I did!"

Gaga also said that she changed her name because she had to. "I am—Stefani is—a perpetually tortured artist. That's why I changed my name. I can't be her in public. She would be a mess," Gaga confessed.

A beautiful, dark, twisted, tortured mess!

The mag lands Sept. 24.

See Lady Gaga's Elle Video Shoot

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