On Friday, September 14, 1984, at 9:00 P.M. Eastern Time, MTV broadcast the first MTV Video Music Awards ceremony live from Radio City Music Hall in midtown Manhattan. The ceremony’s eighth performer was a twenty-six-year-old singer named Madonna Louise Ciccone, who performed her recently recorded single “Like a Virgin.” Madonna walked onto the stage in a white tulle wedding dress, a tulle veil, a layered set of crucifix necklaces, lace fingerless gloves, white stockings, and a metal “Boy Toy” belt buckle at her waist. She sang the song’s first verse standing on top of a giant wedding-cake set piece. She descended the cake during the second verse. She began rolling on the floor approximately halfway through the song, her wedding dress riding up to expose the white stockings, her hair becoming progressively more disheveled. She finished the song lying on her back. The audience at Radio City was confused. The MTV broadcast, watched by approximately ten million American viewers, was not.
Madonna had released her self-titled debut album fourteen months earlier, in July 1983. The album had produced three top-twenty singles (“Holiday,” “Borderline,” “Lucky Star”) and had established her as a rising New York dance-pop performer. The September 1984 MTV performance was her first major nationally televised solo appearance. The performance was the cultural event that transformed her from a rising dance-pop performer into the most-discussed female performer of the decade.
The Like a Virgin album was released seven weeks later, on Monday, November 12, 1984. It debuted at number eight on the Billboard 200 and reached number one in December. By Easter 1985 it had sold approximately five million copies in the United States. By the end of the decade, Madonna had become the bestselling female recording artist in history, the most-cited female performer in American media, and the manufactured-and-remanufactured cultural object that every subsequent female pop star would model herself on.
Radio City Music Hall, September 14, 1984
The 1984 MTV Video Music Awards were the first ceremony of their kind. MTV, the cable music-video network launched on August 1, 1981, had reached approximately twenty-two million American households by mid-1984. The September 14 ceremony at Radio City Music Hall was hosted by Dan Aykroyd and Bette Midler. The performers included Tina Turner, ZZ Top, Ray Parker Jr., and Huey Lewis and the News. Madonna was the only solo female performer on the live performance roster.
Madonna’s performance had been negotiated with MTV’s producers two weeks earlier. The song selection (“Like a Virgin,” not yet released as a single, scheduled for release on October 31, 1984) was Madonna’s choice. The set-piece wedding cake had been designed by the show’s production team to Madonna’s brief: she had requested a large white cake from which she could descend during the second verse. The wedding dress had been pulled from Madonna’s own wardrobe by her stylist Maripol, with adjustments by costume designer Marlene Stewart. The crucifix necklaces, the lace fingerless gloves, the rosary, and the “Boy Toy” metal belt buckle were Madonna’s signature 1984 styling, assembled by Maripol from a mix of vintage finds, Catholic religious-supply stores, and graffiti-art jewelry.
The performance unfolded across three minutes and fifty-two seconds. Madonna sang the first verse standing on top of the wedding cake. She descended during the bridge. By the second chorus she was on her knees. By the third chorus she was on her back, rolling. The choreography was largely improvised. Madonna later told interviewers that she had been trying to look natural and had accidentally exposed her stockings while rolling. The exposure read on broadcast as deliberate.
The reaction within the music industry was immediate. The performance generated approximately three hundred press articles in the week following the broadcast. Most coverage focused on the wedding dress, the crucifixes, the floor-rolling, and what reviewers characterized as the performer’s deliberate provocation of Catholic religious imagery. The “Like a Virgin” single, released six weeks later, reached number one on December 22, 1984. It remained at number one for six consecutive weeks. The performance had created the audience for the song.
Bay City, Michigan to New York
Madonna Louise Ciccone was born on Saturday, August 16, 1958, in Bay City, Michigan. Her father, Silvio “Tony” Ciccone, was a thirty-year-old first-generation Italian-American optical and military engineer who worked for Chrysler Defense Corporation, the military-vehicle subsidiary of the automotive company. Her mother, Madonna Louise Fortin Ciccone, was a French-Canadian-American X-ray technician and former dancer. Tony’s parents were Italian emigrants from the village of Pacentro in the Abruzzo region. The Ciccone family lived in Pontiac, Michigan, in the suburbs of Detroit. Madonna was the third of six children.
On Sunday, December 1, 1963, when Madonna was five years old, her mother died of breast cancer. The family was, by all subsequent accounts, devastated. Tony Ciccone remarried in 1966, choosing the family’s housekeeper. The children were raised in a strict Catholic household. Madonna attended Catholic elementary schools, then Rochester Adams High School in Rochester Hills, from which she graduated approximately one semester early.
In 1976, eighteen years old, Madonna was admitted to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on a dance scholarship. She studied dance at Michigan for two years. In 1977 she received a six-week scholarship to study with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York City. In 1978 she performed briefly with the choreographer Pearl Lang in New York. At nineteen, on her dance instructor’s advice, she dropped out of the University of Michigan and moved to New York in July 1978 with thirty-five dollars and no apartment.
Her first years in New York were difficult. She worked variously as a nude art model at the Art Students League, a waitress at the Russian Tea Room, and a backup dancer for several small companies. She formed her first band, Breakfast Club, with then-boyfriend Dan Gilroy in 1980. She traveled to Paris in 1980 as a backup singer for the disco artist Patrick Hernandez. She returned to New York in 1981 and formed Emmy with her former Michigan boyfriend Stephen Bray. From 1981 to 1982 she lived in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s SoHo loft. Mark Kamins, the resident DJ at the downtown nightclub Danceteria, played her demo tape and arranged her introduction to Seymour Stein, the president of Sire Records, who signed her to a two-single deal in 1982. Her debut single, “Everybody,” was released in October 1982 and reached number three on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Songs chart. She was twenty-four.
The Reinventions
The reinvention pattern was established with the second album. The first album, Madonna, had been released by Sire Records on July 27, 1983, and had presented her in a downtown-New-York dance-pop style, with peroxide-blonde hair, layered crucifixes, lace fingerless gloves, and the early Maripol-styled “Boy Toy” look that combined Catholic religious imagery, 1980s street-fashion graffiti aesthetics, and bare-midriff dance club wardrobe. The album sold approximately ten million copies worldwide across its first three years and produced three top-twenty Billboard Hot 100 singles (“Holiday,” “Borderline,” “Lucky Star”).
The second album, Like a Virgin, was a different image. Nile Rodgers, the former Chic guitarist and producer of David Bowie’s Let’s Dance (1983), produced the album at the Power Station studio in New York. The album’s release in November 1984 was accompanied by the September 1984 MTV VMA performance and by the “Like a Virgin” music video, which Madonna had shot on location in Venice, Italy, with the director Mary Lambert. The look was sharper than the first album: tighter blonde curls, more visible makeup, and a deeper deployment of the Maripol crucifixes and the white-bridal wedding-dress costume.
The third album, True Blue, was released on Monday, June 30, 1986, by Sire Records. The look was the third reinvention: Madonna had cropped her hair into a platinum-blonde, short, Marilyn-Monroe-pastiche style for the album cover, photographed by Herb Ritts in pastel pink against a blue background. The album produced five top-five singles (“Live to Tell,” “Papa Don’t Preach,” “Open Your Heart,” “True Blue,” “La Isla Bonita”) and sold approximately twenty-five million copies worldwide. The “Open Your Heart” music video, directed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino, presented Madonna in a black corset performing in a peep-show booth, an image that became one of the most-imitated visual references of the late 1980s.
The fourth album of the decade, Like a Prayer, was released on Tuesday, March 21, 1989, by Sire Records. Patrick Leonard and Stephen Bray produced the album. The image was the fourth reinvention: Madonna had dyed her hair dark brunette for the album cover, abandoned the layered crucifixes for a single large crucifix, and adopted a Catholic-iconography visual program that included stigmata, burning crosses, and the Black saint figure played by Leon Robinson in the title track’s music video. The “Like a Prayer” music video, directed by Mary Lambert, premiered on March 18, 1989, as part of a two-million-dollar Pepsi commercial campaign. Two weeks later, on April 4, 1989, Pepsi cancelled the campaign after protests from Catholic religious groups. Madonna kept the two-million-dollar Pepsi advance.
The Engineering
The Madonna look was specifically engineered. The early-decade Boy Toy / Like a Virgin phase was designed by Maripol, a French-Italian jewelry designer and stylist who had moved to New York in 1976 and worked with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and other downtown artists. Maripol’s contribution to the Madonna look included the layered crucifix necklaces (assembled from religious-supply-store rosary beads and gold chain), the lace fingerless gloves (originally meant to evoke nineteenth-century Catholic mourning), the rosary bracelets, the rubber bracelets, and the “Boy Toy” metal belt buckle that Madonna wore in the September 1984 MTV performance.
The hair was the work of Sharon Gault, an American hair stylist who became Madonna’s primary collaborator in 1984 and continued working with her through the 1990s and 2000s. The peroxide-blonde, teased, finger-styled hair of the Like a Virgin era was Gault’s specific construction: rough-bleached, mousse-applied, and styled to fall asymmetrically over Madonna’s face. The platinum-blonde short True Blue hair was a more controlled Marilyn Monroe pastiche, photographed by Herb Ritts and styled by Gault to look both retro and modern. The dark brunette Like a Prayer hair was a deliberate inversion of the platinum and represented a return to what Madonna had occasionally described as her natural color.
The wardrobe through the decade was assembled by costume designers including Marlene Stewart, who designed for Madonna’s tours and music videos from 1985 onward, and Jean-Paul Gaultier, the French fashion designer who would design the iconic cone bras for the 1990 Blond Ambition Tour. The 1980s wardrobe was eclectic: Catholic religious imagery for the early phase, Marilyn Monroe pastel pink and platinum diamond for the Material Girl era, black corset and fishnets for the Open Your Heart era, and dark religious vestments for the Like a Prayer era.
The producers across the decade were Reggie Lucas (debut album), Nile Rodgers (Like a Virgin), Patrick Leonard and Stephen Bray (True Blue and Like a Prayer). Madonna co-wrote almost every song on every album beginning with True Blue. The reinvention extended to the songwriting itself: each album cycle introduced a new musical genre (early-80s downtown dance-pop on Madonna, mid-80s pop-rock on Like a Virgin, Latin-influenced ballads on True Blue, gospel-house-rock fusion on Like a Prayer). The look was engineered. The sound was engineered. The reinventions were the work.
After the Decade
The 1990s extended the reinvention pattern. The “Vogue” single, released in March 1990 from the I’m Breathless film soundtrack, presented Madonna in a 1930s-Hollywood-glamour Marlene Dietrich style. The Blond Ambition Tour, which ran from April 13 to August 5, 1990, brought the Jean-Paul Gaultier cone bra into popular culture. The Truth or Dare documentary, released May 10, 1991, presented Madonna as a behind-the-scenes performer surrounded by gay dancers, in a film that became one of the highest-grossing documentaries in American cinema history. The Sex book, released October 21, 1992, was a coffee-table photography book by Steven Meisel that featured Madonna in a series of staged erotic photographs and produced the strongest critical and commercial backlash of her career. The Erotica album of the same year was her first commercial disappointment in a decade.
The career-saving reinvention came with Ray of Light (Tuesday, February 24, 1998), the William Orbit-produced electronic-music album that won four Grammy Awards in 1999 and established the late-1990s electronica genre as a commercial category. Music (2000) continued the electronic phase. American Life (2003) introduced a political-protest phase that was less commercially successful. Confessions on a Dance Floor (2005) introduced a disco-revival phase. MDNA (2012), Rebel Heart (2015), and Madame X (2019) introduced subsequent reinventions, each accompanied by new collaborators, new wardrobe, new hair, and new musical genre.
The cultural impact of the 1980s phase has been the dominant impact of her career. Every female pop star of the next four decades, including Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Ariana Grande, and Billie Eilish, has been compared to Madonna’s 1980s reinvention template at some point in her career. Madonna’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008 was the formal recognition of this status. The 2023 addition of Like a Virgin to the United States Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry was the institutional recognition. Madonna had sold over three hundred million records worldwide by 2023.
Farrah needed Bruce McBroom and one afternoon in 1976. Madonna needed Maripol, Nile Rodgers, Patrick Leonard, Stephen Bray, Sharon Gault, Marlene Stewart, Jean-Paul Gaultier, four producers, four album-cycle reinventions in the 1980s alone, and four decades of continuous reinvention afterward. Farrah was the 1970s in one image. Madonna was the 1980s in eight, and the four decades after that in dozens more.