At Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour, you wear silver, as decreed by the queen. At the Eras tour, you don an outfit that corresponds to your favorite chapter of Taylor Swift’s career. At Madonna’s Celebration tour, which opened in London last weekend, the crowd’s costumes were decidedly more muted, but no less devotional. A quick scan revealed that a good deal of the audience—mostly middle-aged women and gay men—was wearing T-shirts from past Madonna tours: rare Girlie Show relics from 1993, brightly-colored tees sold on 2006’s Confessions tour, hugely coveted Blond Ambition bomber jackets that date back 33 years. Much of this vintage merch was threadbare and faded—but worn with ecstatic pride.
The shirts made for an appropriate uniform given the show’s unspoken central theme: I’m still kicking. Madonna’s first arena tour in seven years lived up to its name, as a celebration of both her remarkable artistry and of the fact that, yes, she’s still singing and dancing, despite almost all her contemporaries being retired, dead, or relegated to the oldies circuit. The 65-year-old nearly died earlier this year, after a bacterial infection landed her in the hospital; while she didn’t address her illness directly at Tuesday night’s show, she did seem earnestly grateful to see 20,000 adoring fans staring back at her. “Thanks for hanging in there for me, I appreciate it,” she said, before snapping back into Madonna mode: “Now enough of this sentimental bullshit.”
Full article at Pitchfork
