I love fashion and clothes and I love how it mixes in with all other forms of expression. When I was younger, my mum and I used to watch the clothes show and laugh at the insane outfits going down the runway, from excessive use of feathers to whole fruit bowls on the models’ heads. Once the products have filtered down to the High Street they are just a shell of what they used to be and in a way that’s a little bit sad. They are not what the designer initially intended them to be. This happens in almost all cases except one… music.
When an artist gets onstage they suddenly feel they can wear anything and it is acceptable! It becomes a costume… giving them the scope to do whatever they like! The results can sometimes be terrible but sometimes they are fascinating.
One of the most interesting things I find is the ‘illusion’ of the costume. The artist will be dancing about onstage and so they need to be secure, but a lot of them want to wear as few clothes as possible. This in itself presents a problem. So in most cases when they are actually wearing a lot more clothes than it seems, it looks like they are in their raunchiest ever outfit.
Like Rihanna showed at the Brits on Tuesday, a skin-coloured piece of material can give the impression she is wearing a very low plunging top. And this is not her first use of this, on her Last Girl on Earth tour she wore a latex cat suit with what looked like the highest cut thong in the history of the world. This was in fact not the case and though from the cheap seats it looked like she was showing some serious skin – she was really very covered up! Same with Britney in Toxic and her Baby One More Time performance at the VMAs in 2000. They all wanna get naked and they all do so with skin-coloured material. Beyonce, gave the impression she might fall out her dress at her EMA performance of Sweet Dreams but on closer inspection she too was covered!
We all know who started the trend of course, who else but Madonna. However, no matter how many times I type nearly-naked Madonna I can’t find the poster campaign… I do find a lot of other stuff!!!! She wore the bodysuit with diamonds appearing to be naked on a poster to promote one of her songs / albums – exactly like Miss Spears some years later.
Clever fashion leaving celebs not as naked as it may seem!
That City Style 