Before the wasteland years of Brazilian toyboys, body-builder biceps and open-all-hours crotch-flashing, Madonna was a real couture icon.
If you used to be a kid of the Eighties, you will have put a table-cloth on your head to copy Like A Virgin Madonna ; if you are a kid of the Noughties, you may look thru this photograph studio and ask, “Isn’t that Woman Gaga?” Quite. Whether on a live tour, attending a film premiere ( very often on the arm of then-husband Sean Penn ) or just being papped in the street, everybody’s fave Material Girl sure knew the easy way to work it.
Born Madonna Louise Ciccone in Bay Town , Michigan, she was heading for mega stardom from a young age – moving to New York at the tender age of nineteen for a vocation in modern dance and releasing her self-titled first album, Madonna, 6 years after. Her Madgesty’s rise and rise in the style stakes was linked to the explosion of MTV, and each of her music videos – think Pappy Don’t Evangelise , Like A Virgin, Material Girl – gave us a Madonna look more covetable than the last. And do not even get us started on her big-screen incarnations, in such cult classics as Hopelessly Looking for Susan, Who’s That Girl and Shanghai Surprise…
As undies worn as outerwear powers up the trend-o-meter for spring / summer 2010, check out Madonna showing us how it was done, like, thirty years back. The platinum hair! The red lips! The Gaultier conical bra! Read on, and relive the wizardry. Picture : Madonna wears a sequinned tank, black tube skirt and outsized denim shirt with fishnets and a key pendant in this undated early shot, taken in NY.