It took a while to marinate – I’ll admit, I even initially dissed the look in our Met Gala coverage yesterday – but now I’m calling it: Madonna had far and away the best showing at this year’s event.
Her look came as a shock at first: The Queen of Pop is on a PR blitz at the moment to promote her soon-to-be-released Confessions on a Dancefloor II album, and has just released a fun, frothy duet with pop disciple Sabrina Carpenter.
The vibe this era seems to be hedonistic dancefloor fun – so it was a surprise when the first photos came through, showing Madonna looking morose, drowning in a sea of black on the Met Gala stairs.
Those initial photos, though, didn’t do justice to the scale of the stunt the 67-year-old singer pulled off.
An avid art collector, Madonna’s look for this year’s “Fashion is Art” event was a direct reference to a section of British-Mexican surrealist painter Leonora Carrington’s painting The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1945).
Every detail is the same: Madonna, as the woman in black with a ship for a hat and wearing a golden horn, while her giant veil is held aloft at six points by women in long flowing dresses. Check them out side by side:
And as some on social media pointed out, the attention to detail made this Met Gala look one for the ages: Not only did Madonna make an incredible entrance with her giant veil and posse of attendants, she even brought her own soundtrack.
No surprise she knows the power of music to create a moment – watch the video below, and you can hear a dramatic orchestral backing, complete with seagulls squawking, that was played only for her entrance:
As with every Met Gala, there were many varied interpretations of this year’s “Fashion is Art” dresscode, which sounded more like a Lady Gaga song title than a theme (fashion is art … isn’t that kinda the theme of every Met Gala?).
Both Nicholas Hoult and Luke Evans dressed in Tom of Finland-inspired butch leather drag (Hoult more successfully than Evans, who perhaps took his inspiration a tad too literally and looked like he’d come straight from the Laird).
Actress Sarah Paulson claimed that she was wearing a $1 bill on her face as a weak-ass protest against the 1% (cue an eye roll so intense I may require hospitalisation), while internet crush Hudson Williams, bless him, looked like his mum had dressed him up for Book Week with his Black Swan-inspired ensemble.
I’ll admit to a fair bit of bias here, not just as a lifelong Madonna fan but as one who jumped on the train specifically in 1998, when the release of single Frozen ushered in the launch of her career high point, the Ray of Light album.
The music video could not have stood out more on Video Hits in 1998 among the Barbie Girls and I Want It That Ways of the time.
A then-40-year-old Madonna emerged from the icy desert tundra like some sort of entrancing witch from the future, cooing a sparse six-minute trip-hop ballad enlivened by crashing drums.
The Chris Cunningham-video is still considered one of the best of all time, and Frozen stands as one of her greatest-ever songs (controversial opinion alert: Live To Tell? Oh Father? The Power of Good-Bye? Real ones know all the best Madonna songs are ballads).
To see Madonna back in her goth bag, almost 30 years on … Chills.