Last summer all the lads were sporting ribbon-trimmed straw fedoras pulled down low in front, and this year it looks like they’re going to be sporting black porkpies perched at perilous angles. At a diner I spotted a young man wearing one just like that and it took me right back to the 1980’s, when I was in high school, and, more specifically 1986, when Madonna wore one in the video for Open Your Heart.
I can’t tell you how much videos meant to us back then. We listened to music on the radio and on cassette tapes in our Walkmen. We saw what artists looked like by reading Creem and watching MTV, whose original mission was to, like, play music. And I can’t tell you how much Madonna meant to us back then. It wasn’t all the obvious things she did to provoke – like singing about being a virgin and wearing wedding dress. It was the way she dressed up and then dressed down and wore too much makeup and transformed herself into the different women she wanted to be: lady, artist, ingenue, whore. After seeing the videos for Burning Up and Borderline I acquired fishnets, black leggings and an oversized white t-shirt with neon graphics. I didn’t wear them with the boldness that Madonna did and I couldn’t, as I was a trapped in a Catholic school uniform and my own nice-girl inhibitions. But I started, tentatively, using clothing to make myself the person I wanted to be.