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On March 3, 1989, Madonna released her music video for “Like a Prayer.” Directed by her longtime collaborator Mary Lambert, the clip quickly took on a life of its own, solidifying fashion’s pivotal role in music videos. The iconography remains iconic: Madonna’s weighty cross necklace paired with a provocative black lace slip dress was controversial, even sinful. This was intentional, of course: The video addressed topics of institutionalized racism and criminal injustice — a black man is imprisoned for a crime he did not commit —not to mention the cross-burning defacement of religious insignia; the clothes pushed back against those same boundaries.

Three decades later, that lingerie dress is now timeless, a tidy representation of the video’s thematic elements as a whole. While Madonna is a strong example, this close association between clothes and content is not unique to the “Material Girl.” One simply can’t talk about pop music without also discussing fashion, and historically, there’s been no greater stage for fashion than in the kind of short film meant to be disseminated to millions of people on platforms like MTV and VH1.

“When we were growing up, MTV was everyone’s go-to for fashion, and music videos had such a huge impact on our culture at that time,” says stylist B. Åkerlund, whose list of clientele — including Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Madonna, Nicki Minaj, and Paul McCartney — reads something like a line of succession in pop royalty. “But music videos have always set such a tone for the song, and when you think of a song, you think of the video. You know what that artist wore.”

As pop music itself has gotten bigger, bolder, and more creative, so have its videos — despite diminished budgets in the hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars range — as have the clothes in them that help establish an artist’s image. So while fashion in pop videos has evolved in the four decades since the dawn of MTV, the two have also become more interdependent than ever.

Today, the “pop” category spans across genres: The current Top 40 is a reliable cocktail of R&B (SZA), hip-hop (Travis Scott), soft rock (Maroon 5), and even country (Kacey Musgraves). According to British musicologist Simon Frith, pop is that which is produced as a matter of enterprise, not art, and designed to appeal to everyone.

“In musical terms, it is essentially conservative,” Frith wrote in the 2001 book The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock. “Pop is not do-it-yourself music, but is professionally produced and packaged.” Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” video was an interesting nexus of the two: It certainly wasn’t “conservative,” and it wasn’t intended to appeal to everyone. And yet, its five minutes and 37 seconds represented the absolute pinnacle of pop.

By the mid- to late-1990s, we had emerged in a post-Madonna world: Those aesthetic walls Madge had worked to bring down — using a slip dress as a means to expose the more puritanical expectations of women in contemporary society, for example — had inspired other pop musicians to play with fashion in similarly inventive ways and challenge themselves to be more creative with style. (Twenty years later, Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro” video may have paid the most literal homage — donning a red latex habit, the pop star swallows a rosary before appearing in nude-toned underwear — and was promptly condemned by the Catholic League.)

Read full article at The Zoe Report

Jeremy Scott on Madonna: Truth or Dare and feeling seen
“Growing up in a small town where I was ostracised for loving fashion and being gay, seeing a global superstar be so unabashedly pro-gay made me feel seen; understood; like I mattered, and that all the bigotry I was experiencing was just a microcosm of the larger world that I had yet to discover. Before there were allies, there was only Madonna: she was gorgeous, talented, provocative. She wore the coolest clothes and loved the gays! The documentary Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991) was an opportunity to glimpse behind the curtain into her life and it gave me confidence. Beyond all the emotions I have about the film, it is a great work of art about an amazing artist at the top of her game in the eye of the storm called pop culture! Plus, there’s a lot of great cameo moments — from the likes of Jean Paul Gaultier himself and his wonderful costumes for her tour, and not to mention those iconic Fluevog platform heels — it’s a wonderful portrait of high fashion from the start of the 1990s.”

More at VOGUE Australia

Madonna is partnering with Meek Mill’s advocacy group REFORM Alliance to send much-needed personal protective equipment to jails and prisons which have become coronavirus hotspots across the country.

More than 50,000 surgical masks will be donated to Chicago’s Cook County Jail, which has been hit hard by the pandemic. Six inmates have died, while 210 staffers and 235 inmates have tested positive, according to the county sheriff’s department. Another 192 detainees and 120 staffers have recovered from the virus. 

The Louisiana Department of Corrections will also receive 20,000 masks, while another 30,000 will be sent to California’s Vacaville Prison, FCI Ray Brook in New York and the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department in Massachusetts.

REFORM and Madonna’s Ray of Light Foundation worked with several activist groups for the initiative, including apparel company Pair of Thieves, The Bail Project and #cut50.

“More than 2 million lives in prisons across America are currently at stake due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” REFORM co-chair Michael Rubin said in a statement. “It’s absolutely crucial that we protect our inmates and prison staff, especially since social distancing guidelines are difficult to abide by in these facilities.”

Earlier this month, REFORM sent 100,000 face masks to facilities including the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman and Rikers Island jail complex in New York City.

More at WLNS