Times Online
From New York club kid to Evita – Madonna’s reinventions have been at the centre of her success. As a collection of her stage costumes goes on show, we try on some of her most famous garments – and Lisa Armstrong considers the semiotics of those bras, bustiers and sequins.
Even if you are as one with Lily (“Madonna is the most overrated person in pop history”) Allen, there is something satisfyingly perverse about seeing her clothes become, in these topsy-turvy economic times, the stuff of investors’ dreams. At any rate, two venture capitalists, with an eye to future riches, have spent the past two years tracking down her more memorable outfits, chasing up documentation to corroborate their provenance (you wouldn’t believe the number of fakes out there) and batting away rival collectors in the bidding wars.
The fruits, so far, tally some 250 items of clothing, plus another 50 or so pieces of Madonna ephemera, including awards, although perhaps they won’t prove so ephemeral. “I’m by no means a Madonna freak,” says Chetan Trivedi, one of the VCs, “but when you look at how wide her demographic is and how long she has been at the top, Madonna’s clothes start to look like a better bet than the stock market.” This is a point not lost on the Material One herself, who has a warehouse in Los Angeles where she stores the pieces she’s kept post-1993.
What makes this collection more visceral than most are the traces of the woman who wore them – make-up smudges on a beret, perspiration stains on one of the corsets worn in rehearsals. For the moment, the collection resides in the vaults of Coutts, but soon it will be unleashed in an exhibition. And for anyone with an interest in popular culture, it’s worth a look. Madonna’s assault on the world can’t properly be viewed outside the prism of the clothes she wore while mounting it. From the early scavenged props, through the dark Marlene years, when Madonna gender-bent and flashed more parts of her anatomy than seemed compatible with her status as a world superstar, to the pastel Juicy Couture jogging suits of the early Mummy years, from Geisha Girl to Braveheart, Latino sexpot to Marie Antoinette, voluptuous Marilyn to a 50-year-old leotard-toting, designer-bandage-sporting defier of gravity, fashion has been integral to her identity.
No one can accuse her of idleness. In 25 years she has developed a new kind of body to aspire to, one that arguably hands women power over their shape; extended the shelf life of gyrating female performers by two decades and counting; pushed female sexual boundaries to places that chart-topping female singers had never seen the need to drag them (granted, this wasn’t always a pretty sight); invited the gay scene to the mainstream party; experimented with most genres of pop and rock; defied social mores (then embraced them); and subjected herself to more image changes than a serial witness protection scheme participant.
Naturally, this was all entirely self-seeking – and not especially original. Arguably, her most creative fashion legacy, pieced together from fragments worn by Martha Graham dancers, the street and Madonna’s idiosyncratic twists, was the first public incarnation, made famous in the Like a Virgin video, then indelible in Desperately Seeking Susan. This rag-tag look endeared because it was accessible and yet distinctive, achieved without money. It captured an aspect of the Eighties that tends to be overlooked: the decade’s optimism, verve and spirit of DIY.
The other style moments, like her musical output, are generally the fruits of gifted larceny. She didn’t invent conical bras, any more than she came up with the concept of androgyny.
But she knew the right time to wear them – after the prototypes had been perfected, but before they’d lost their power to shock or surprise. And yet for all the thrusting and sexual provocation, she has never really been a (straight) man magnet. She’s way too terrifying, particularly during her gynaecologically obsessed period.
But if you’re a woman, if you’re gay, if you’ve ever enjoyed one of her songs or thought she looked nice dressed up as Eva Perón, if you’re one of scores of designers, from the global big shots to the unknowns, whom she patronised and subsequently put on the map, then you’ve been under the Madonna influence. Resistance may just be futile.
The exhibition Simply Madonna is at the Old Truman Brewery, London E1, from February 21 to March 31
Material Girl, 1985
Hiring a kitschly pink satin strapless dress for the video of Material Girl, Madonna openly plagiarised Monroe’s scene in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. But where Monroe was part gold-digger, part adorable naif, Madonna is entirely knowing. This was a platinum blonde whose eyebrows were deliberately left a contradictory shade of charcoal and whose body was beginning to look as though she could go several rounds in the ring. Given that workout regime, Monroe wouldn’t be the later Madonna’s chosen screen reference – Dietrich would, and not the fleshy young Dietrich of the Lola era.
Attempting to put a twist on Anita Loos’ satire on materialism, Madonna, hair slickly waved, interspersed scenes from the 1953 movie with a new story that showed her playing an actress being wooed by a Hollywood director who has to pretend to be poor in order to win her (unmaterialistic) heart. Hah! Ironically, it’s Monroe who emerges as the more subversive.
Sex, 1992
Jean Paul Gaultier had been playing with cone bras through the Eighties, and Yves Saint Laurent had tinkered with them 20 years earlier. But no one expected anyone to wear them, until Madonna commissioned Gaultier to design the costumes for her Blonde Ambition tour in 1990.
This period saw Madonna’s exhibitionism reach potentially corrosive extremes, culminating with Sex, the explicit picture book she released in 1992. Flaunting its artistic credentials – the photographs were taken by Italian Vogue’s Steven Meisel – Sex was a puzzling and shocking detour from a superstar who, so it seemed, didn’t need to strip off and get gynaecological. Sex sold out, but along with 1993’s Body of Evidence, in which Madonna played a woman trying to kill a man by having sex with him, it almost finished her career. A period of relative restraint followed.
Evita, 1996
Madonna’s formidable lobbying tactics paid off when Alan Parker finally cast her in the role she felt she was born to play. You can see why she identified with Eva Perón up to a point: humble background, ruthless climb to the top. But Evita was more than a demanding diva; she was thought to be complicit in the disappearance of anyone who crossed her, as well as millions of Argentina’s missing pesos. Oh well, she gave great wardrobe.
Working out every day despite her pregnancy (Lourdes Ciccone was born three months before the premiere), Madonna more than did Perón’s style justice. In curlicues of eyeliner and Christian Dior lipstick, she worked every one of those 85 costume changes, 39 hats and 49 hairstyles.
This was a first glimpse of Madonna doing ladylike, later a glossy magazine staple in her English country lady period. The release of the film saw a revival in Forties tailoring, and for months Madonna wore suits and cultivated an überpale skin.
Music, 2000
Having exhausted Eva Perón and geishas, Madonna turned to facets of her homeland that had previously failed to engage her. Although the early Noughties vogue for ghetto fabulousness seemed at odds with Madonna’s increasing interest in kabbalah, it provided some irresistible style opportunities. The white three-piece trouser suit she wore for the Music video (in which she allowed Sacha Baron Cohen’s alter ego Ali G – then Britain’s coolest comic figure – to send her up, thus winning hearts in her adopted homeland) was not a million miles from the Savile Row-inspired tailoring her friend Stella McCartney was churning out for her recently launched label.
American Pie, 2000
The vest-and-jeans outfit that Madonna wore for her American Pie video was as wholesome and straightforward as the raven hair and kimono-inspired clothes of Ray of Light had been mysterious (or pretentious, depending on your taste).
If her cover of Don McLean’s Sixties standard was banal, it at least pre-empted the waves of patriotism that engulfed America after 9/11 – and, as McLean contentedly noted, ensured that “I’ll never have to work again.”
Re-Invention Tour, 2004
Jean Paul Gaultier was back on board, along with Karl Lagerfeld, Christian Lacroix and Stella McCartney. Madonna’s pirating tendencies were more eclectic than ever – ranging from Marie Antoinette to Braveheart and Carnival, and the clothes were some of the most beautiful to have gone on a pop tour. But the whole enterprise felt like a stock-taking of sort; a montage of Madonna’s greatest style hits was played on a giant screen every night – an indication that while the chameleon gene was still active, the desire for dramatic transformations that spilt over into real life was waning.
No comments:
Post a Comment