WHERE’S THAT GIRL NOW?

McCartney dress with a big bow at the neck, so plain and unrevealing it could have been cut from the Yearning for Zion prairie-dress pattern book, you might even have thought that the ultimate provocateur had been chastened—the Mamma Madonna.

For a performer who has spent 25 years shocking audiences into submission, Madonna’s latest stylistic reinvention—timed to the start of a new tour next month—is mostly shocking for not having teeth. The new Madonna look, as seen in paparazzi photographs taken on the streets of New York over the last couple of weeks, evokes a kind of athletic, campus-casual blandness. In one photograph, she is wearing a loose blouse with saggy satin shorts and cut-off sheer tights, maybe a pair of Miu Miu heels and a Louis Vuitton bag from last season.

One could argue that performers like Cher and Barbra Streisand began to lose their fashion potency at the point they set out on what seemed like never-ending farewell tours. Madonna, who turns 50 on August 16, plans to remain on the stage for the next decade.

During the “Confessions” tour two years ago, audience members were noticeably older. Last summer, Madonna’s positive Q score, a measure of familiarity and appeal, was 13, compared with an average positive score of 17 for most performers, and her negative rating (representing people who were turned off by her) was 39. That reveals a slight decrease in her popularity since 2000, when her positive rating was 14.

On the cover of her new album, “Hard Candy”, Madonna is repackaged as a fighter. She is dressed in a black bodysuit, championship belt, above-the-knee patent leather boots and what appears to be a mullet. Her makeup is pale and alien looking. In the first video releases, 4 Minutes and Give It 2 Me, she dances in sheer tops and more high boots, here with labels like Chanel and Roberto Cavalli. Yet neither video yielded a breakout Madonna look.

“She doesn’t seem to have found a particular look for this album,” said Clare Parmenter, a 35-year-old biomedical scientist in London who maintains a fan site called Madonnalicious.com. Madonna’s “Blond Ambition” tour in 1990, which included Jean Paul Gaultier’s conical bras, established, for better or worse, the use of innerwear as outerwear. The aftershocks of her cowboy attire for “Music” (2000) are still being felt.

Jay Engel, 29, who runs the website Absolutemadonna.com, said, “Maybe she’s uncomfortable and trying to figure out who she is at 50.” But Mauricio Padilha, a partner in the fashion production company MAO, is in her corner, even posing in a boxing belt for his birthday party invitation. “The whole look is about empowerment,” he said.

There has also been a perceptible shift in the labels Madonna wears, from indie players like Olivier Theyskens to the bigger fashion houses, since she began working with a new stylist, who mysteriously asks to be known only as B., and who has said she is pursuing an edgier look for Madonna. But the implication is that she is following fashion, not the other way around.
-ERIC WILSON (NYT)