On Monday, Madonna made her return to the Met Gala after a seven-year hiatus. For this 12 months’s theme of “tailor-made for you,” Madonna wore a Tom Ford by Haider Ackermann: a cream double-breasted tuxedo in peached silk, full with a crisp white piqué plastron shirt paired with a white piqué bow tie. The look was completed off with jewels by Diamonds Direct.
It nearly wasn’t even a actuality, says Madonna’s stylist Rita Melssen.
“She truly wasn’t going to go, it wasn’t even actually on her radar. After which somebody introduced it as much as her, and naturally she was like, ‘that is an unimaginable theme and I wish to assist and I wish to present up,” Melssen says. “We did some actually deep, deep dives, deep analysis, bought actually into Black dandy over the a long time. What did that appear like from the 1800s into the 2000s and all of the completely different iterations and variations of it. Her and I actually simply sat down. We shared suggestions, we shared photos. It was a very collaborative course of between the each of us.”
Melssen felt there have been any variety of instructions they may go in when it got here to a designer to work with, till somebody despatched her a picture of Madonna’s iconic 1995 VMA look sporting a Tom Ford for Gucci blue silk button-down shirt.
“I used to be like, ‘wait, Haider simply had this unimaginable, unimaginable season and the primary assortment [at Tom Ford], and I had truly met him when he got here to her tour in Paris.”
Madonna
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She gave him a name and the response was a right away “sure.”
“He has such a deep reverence for M and all the things she stood for. Haider is also adopted, and he or she has 4 adopted youngsters. And so there was a very deep connection there. Haider additionally grew up in Africa, and M clearly does a lot work in Africa and Malawi and along with her charities, so there was already form of this overlap and connection there,” Melssen says. “Once I referred to as him he was like, ‘I wish to make her simply so highly effective and chic and present simply the essence of who she is.’”
The entire look got here collectively in nearly three weeks. The look drew inspiration from Gladys Bentley, a Black lesbian blues singer in New York Metropolis within the Twenties.
“Gladys Bentley was one of many unique Black feminine dandies. She was a performer in Harlem across the Harlem Renaissance, and he or she used to put on these unimaginable white fits, like a white tail coat, white shirt, white hat, white pants,” Melssen says. “And she or he was a Black lesbian throughout that point, which was remarkable. And so she actually pushed a number of boundaries and he or she made folks see gender and identification in a really completely different manner and was actually a trailblazer in that manner.”
Haider Ackermann and Madonna
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Madonna was instantly enthusiastic about Bentley as a reference when Melssen steered the thought.
“After all it’s very completely different, don’t get me fallacious. However there’s simply so some ways wherein when M was developing, she additionally challenged gender identification and what a lady can and might’t do, additionally in reverence to all the ladies that got here earlier than her,” Melssen says. “In her personal manner, M is a dandy, to have this audacity to push boundaries and to push folks to consider her and girls typically in a really completely different manner.”
The primary time Madonna tried the look on for Melssen and Ackermann and the Tom Ford workforce, the entire room knew it was the one.
“Haider was standing subsequent to me and the literal hairs on his arms raised and he had goosebumps,” Melssen says. “So all of us slept effectively that evening.”
