It’s the feud endlessly regurgitated by drag queens and anomalous straight women like myself ever since Madonna’s infamous 2012 “Look it up” comment with regard to calling Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” a reductive version of “Express Yourself.” In recent times, that documentary that really didn’t need to be made since Truth or Dare already exists allowed Gaga to declare that her only beef with Madonna was that she didn’t say what she had to say to her face, summing it up as, “I just want Madonna to fucking push me up against the wall and kiss me and tell me I’m a piece of shit.” But Madonna don’t waste her breath or workout regime on such trivialities. She also has a litter of children to manage in terms of what levels of petty to concern herself with (to quote Carrie Fisher in Sex and the City, “I have a child. You know, I, I really, I can’t do this.”).
Enter Donatella Versace to settle the score in outfitting Gaga with a custom leotard featuring a barrage of Vogue covers for her Milan performance of the Joanne World Tour. Knowing full well that Lady G would trust her implicitly to dress her in whatever she so chose (the woman wrote a song about her for fuck’s sake), it feels as though the Italian mogul was possessed by a delicious sense of irony in selecting the May 1989 Vogue cover featuring a pool-drenched Madonna as its subject. Sure, neutral Swiss types can try to chalk it up to happenstance all they want, but I think we know Donatella is meticulous in her design selections and put plenty of thought into the covers she selected for the garment.
This branding of Madonna onto her body is nothing if not rich considering Gaga has only feigned water under the bridge–playing the innocente with such comments as, “…she’s a nice lady” [the biggest non-statement of all time, by the way], “and she’s had a fantastic huge career, biggest pop star of all time… But I play a lot of instruments. I write all my own music. I spend hours and hours a day in the studio. I’m a producer. I’m a writer.” Bitch. What the fuck do you think Madonna has been doing from the second she learned how to play drums and guitar from Dan Gilroy in the ramshackle confines of an abandoned synagogue in Queens? The effrontery of this so-called superiority on her part for writing and producing her own music is precisely why she needed Donatella to check her reality with this leotard–which, by the way, is a garment Madonna already owned in the Confessions on a Dance Floor era–not to mention her signature conical one for the “Open Your Heart” video that started it all.
What’s more, Donatella’s subtle in its bombast–as only an Italian can execute–shade proves that her loyalty will always lie with the O.G. Italian American pop star, you know, the one who actually met and was friends with her brother instead of being merely a poseur in wanting to act in a TV series about his murder. Thank the sartorial gods that didn’t happen though, instead choosing to let Gaga be hit with a Versace bomb in an altogether different sort of way.
