On September 6, 1990, Madonna performed her iconic hit “Vogue” at the 7th annual MTV Video Music Awards, held at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, California. This performance, inspired by the style of Marie Antoinette, has since become one of the most memorable in VMA history, solidifying Madonna’s status as a boundary-pushing artist.
That night, the “Vogue” music video also won in three categories: Best Direction, Best Editing, and Best Cinematography, further cementing its impact on the music and fashion industries. Billboard, Slant Magazine, Rolling Stone crowned it as the best VMAs performance of all time.
One of Madonna’s dancers, Carlton Wilborn, explained that “[such a] level of production had never been done on MTV. The costumes, the fans, the drama… MTV just had no idea; we just came out and rocked.”
The eye-popping performance, and the 18th century finery, were like nothing the MTV audience had seen before… except some probably had. The gown Madonna wore on stage that night had been created by costume designer James Acheson and had actually graced the big screen almost two years earlier, when it had been worn by Glenn Close as the Marquise de Merteuil in the award-winning 1988 film Dangerous Liaisons.
Madonna’s “Vogue” – named not for the iconic fashion magazine but for a term for the highly stylized form of dance created by the underground Black and Latino LGBTQ communities on the makeshift catwalks of Harlem drag balls – was released as the lead single from the I’m Breathless: Music From and Inspired by the Film Dick Tracy album on March 20, 1990.
“Vogue” was recorded quickly and cheaply: Shep Pettibone made the backing track in a brisk two weeks, while Madonna wrote the majority of the lyrics on the plane when she flew to New York to record the track. Her vocals were recorded in single takes in a basement studio with a booth that had been converted from a closet. The song was originally intended to be the B-side accompanying her Like A Prayer single “Keep It Together” (which was released on January 30, 1990), but when Warner Bros. executives heard the track, all parties involved decided that the song should be saved from B-side oblivion and released as a single.
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