If Madonna’s recent live shows, which featured the singer being ‘crucified’ against an ornate cross, didn’t resurrect it, then that fashion shoot she did with Steven Klein for W magazine certainly did. I mean the hoary old question of whether Madonna is “really a perv”.
Unless you’ve been invited into her boudoir, or at least her inner sanctum, you can’t honestly presume to know the answer to that question. But this hasn’t stopped people speculating for probably the last 20 years at least.
There are those who quite reasonably point out that she has done plenty to encourage such speculation. There were those naughty, arty, black-and-white promo videos. There was the Sex book. There was all that fetishistic Jean Paul Gaultier stage clobber, and the Hanky Spanky single. And now, a full on return to the accoutrements of pervery with a strong equestrian flavour thanks to that Klein shoot — an homage to Helmut Newton if ever there was one.
See Madonna in Victorian riding topper and coat, with a hint of rubber pants and fishnet peeking out from beneath. See her stripped down to the aforementioned undergarments, her toned upper body bare except for patent leather full-length gloves, brandishing a riding whip. See her, in perhaps the most Newtonesque sequence, on hands and knees, her head encased in a tight leather ponygirl bridle…
Steven Klein’s Madonna photographs for W mag can be found at www.style.com
You see, that’s the trouble with these bright modern showbiz types — they just keep reinventing themselves. Just when you thought she was settling down to the quiet life of an English country lady and mother (whose affection for horse-riding, though frequently demonstrated, was accompanied by the wearing of nothing more fetishistic than a tweed hacking jacket and jodhpurs), she goes and shows us that there’s still life left yet in the old, erm, y’know. But does she really mean it, or is it just her tireless knack for media manipulation on display again?
I well remember when Sex came out that large swathes of the American BDSM community felt that she had very blatantly exploited the New York SM club where much of it was photographed, to give herself a timely injection of street cred. I remember too the San Francisco author Pat Califia, writing in Skin Two about the need for SMers to become more politicised if we were to win the war against censorship of our lifestyles and our imagery, avowing that we would surely have problems if there was a call to go to the barricades over that book. Califia’s point being that, if you were going to make a stand against censorship of SM imagery, at least you would want to fight for something that was a genuine product of SM culture, not for what many thought was just the brainchild of a manipulative pop floozy desirous of adding another couple of noughts to the end of her bank balance.
I recall the reaction to Sex in London being rather different, consisting chiefly of: “Ooh that Madonna’s gone and done a kinky book”, ”25 quid — that’s a bit steep isn’t it?”, and “Now I’ve taken it out of its silver foil sheath, I can’t get it back in again.” Ultimately which viewpoint was more sensible? The British angle that it was naughty but just a bit of harmless pop fun from someone who probably is a bit kinky because let’s face it we all are a bit, aren’t we? Or the more politicised transatlantic BDSM view that this disingenuous product was potentially going to cause a lot of problems for real SMers? If only so many of those dissenters hadn’t still bought the book and drooled over the pictures, I think they would have had a stronger case.
But this still doesn’t answer the question: is Madonna really a perv? Well, back in the mid-1980s, Daniel James, the bloke who started modern fetish fashion with his latex designs for many of the original Skin Two clubbers, evidently thought so. Daniel had a booth in the legendary Hyper Hyper in High Street Kensington. And he used to tell stories of how the singer, who had by then got several hits under her belt, used to come in to be measured up for rubber outfits. It was clear that he enjoyed the experience, and he gave the strong impression that she did too. Ergo, obviously, she was a perv. But appealing though such ‘evidence’ may be to those actively seeking it, you have to admit it’s pretty inconclusive. She was, after all, a singer and a dancer who was making a serious impact on the world of pop, and she could easily have seen a few sexy Daniel James outfits simply as a sensible professional wardrobe investment. Wearing rubber may have been bold then, but these days the imagery of pop is full of pretty girls in rubber frocks, and it doesn’t mean they’re all dominatrixes in their private lives (“unfortunately”, I sense some of you thinking).
Let us not forget that, even in the days of early hits like Holiday, she was already establishing a reputation as one smart cookie. I know this from personal experience because, as a music journalist on Sounds in the ’80s, I was one of the very first people on our paper to interview her. In fact my interview was only the second we ever ran with her, so I suppose you could say I was in pretty much at the start of her career. When people ask me what the young Madonna was like to talk to back then, I tell them that even as a newbie, she was incredibly articulate and clearly very bright and very very focused. But when they ask what she was like, you know, face-to-face, I have to confess that I didn’t actually meet her. Yes, she was in London doing interviews at her record company offices in Soho, and my paper was based less than a mile away, in offices above Covent Garden Tube station. But it was a hot summer’s day, and I had a lot of production work to get through, and so in the end, I didn’t leave my office — I interviewed her over the phone instead.
Consequently, after she became really famous, I became slightly less famous, at least among my peers in pop hackery, as “the bloke who couldn’t be arsed to meet Madonna”. Some people these days probably think that makes you pretty cool, but I’m not so sure.
www.madonna.com
www.style.com
www.jeanpaulgaultier.com
www.patcalifia.com
Comments