What Madonna Taught Me About Fashion, Sex And Ageing

As Madonna celebrates her 60th birthday, Polly Vernon pens a love letter to the Queen of Pop

“HAPPY BLOODY BIRTHDAY MADONNA! 60 years old, which is… Well. Extraordinary. To say, ‘You don’t look it’ would be to understate the situation considerably, never mind: fall back on a drab old cliché. Drab old clichés are no way to talk about you. A disrupter of clichés. A woman who has devoted her professional life to challenging everything from the Catholic church to homophobia to pervading ideas about whether one can wear a second-hand wedding dress over leggings for a day trip in a Venetian gondola. ‘Don’t look 60?’ You make us wonder what 60 is supposed to look like at all.

I haven’t got you anything, which is rude, given how much you’ve given me. How much you’ve given all of us. The thrills and the spills and the pop, the drama, the marriages, the spectacle. Your outfit in Like A Prayer, aka the look toward which part of me is always aspiring.

You have never been boring; but we – I’m ashamed to say – haven’t always been grateful. Haven’t always Got It. The time you simulated masturbation on stage at the Toronto ’91 performance of the Blonde Ambition tour, and nearly got arrested. The time Pepsi dropped you as a spokesperson after the Vatican threatened to boycott all its products, because of your perpetual questioning of Catholicism, the faith in which you were raised. The live and on-air swearing, the live and on-stage kissing of both Britney and Christina at the 2003 VMAs; the cone-boobed bodices; the 1992 coffee table book SEX, which seems in retrospect, through the filter of an age which offers us hot ’n’ cold running porn on our smart phones, really quite tame – but at the time, caused all that fuss.

The time you refused to hide your face and body away from public sight, despite the fact that you’d had the audacity to get just a little older.