Material Girl
to Geisha Girl
The look is pure subservience. The white-painted face, with lips like a red gash, is framed by a dead straight curtain of dark glossy hair. It is the stark image of a geisha that stares into the camera. So it is difficult to believe that this is Madonna - the woman who sums up feisty independence in the post-feminist era, posing as a silent, submissive geisha girl.
But to take Madonna at face value is to misunderstand one of the most complex and intensely clever female stars of the past two decades.
She is the mistress of reinvention. And behind every change of image - always total, always perfect down to the last detail - is a carefully thought-out strategy to get the attention that she wants.
From the moment the Detroit convent girl hitch-hiked to New York twenty years ago with burning ambition to be the world's most famous woman, she has shown an amazing talent for transformation.
She was named the new face of Max Factor make-ip - quite an achievement at the age of fourty. But the singer almost certainlny has her eye on her next film role. It is no coincidence taht Steven Spielberg is looking fro a woman for his firm adaptation of Arthur Golden's best-selling novel, Memoirs of a Geisha. And if her new geisha look is part of Madonna's campaign to secure the part, who can blame her? It has paid off before.
She desperately wanted the role of Eva Peron in the fil Evita, so she showed director Alan Parker she was the perfect choice by adopting an uncanny resemblance to the Argentinian president's wife.
Madonna has always been a brilliant consolidator of trends, picking up on an existing look and making it her own. When she first bounced into the charts in 1984 with hits such as Holiday, it was as a trashy punk with torn tights and big bangles.
Material Girl in 1985 was not just a clever pastiche on Marilyn Monroe's Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend. The platinym blond hair, furs and grltzy jewellery she wore for the video so entranced actor Sean Penn that he was determined to have her. Another exammple of Madonna dressing for results.
By 1989, when her marriage to Penn formally ended, she had already moved on and was involved with Warren Beatty. For a short time, she dressedlike the gangster's moll she played in their jount movie venture, Dick Tracy, in which she played Breathless Mahoney, a role she took so seriously that she was prepared to put on weight for it.
When the Beatty romance ended, she turned to Jean-Paul Gaultier for space-age outfits with tight corsets and menacing conical bra tops.
At the 1995 MTV Music Video Awards she adopted the Brigitte Bardot look with black eyeliner and loose hair falling over her shoulders.
When Madonna was expecting her daughter, Lourdes, in 1996, she completely vanished from view. It wasn't until Lourdes was nine months old that she emerged as an Earth Mother, wearing pretty dresses and hardly any make-up.
Then at forty, she moved into the Indian mystic phase, and nine months later her hair, which has been almost every colour under the sun, is now back to its natural dark brown, cot in a bob
What has drawn Madonna to the persona of the geisha, one of the most notorious symbols of pre-feminist woman, virtually imprisoned in the service of men?
Only time will tell, but one thing is certain, this geisha is being used in the service of only one person. Madonna herself
