Vogue Talks to The Celebration Tour Costume Designers

Costume sketches by Jean Paul Gaultier and Atelier Versace. Courtesy of the Madonna Celebration Tour

In honour of the kickoff of Madonna’s new show, Vogue talked to The Celebration Tour costume and creative designers Eyob Yohannes and Rita Melssen to get a closer look at the Queen of Pop’s one-of-a-kind, custom-made looks. The interview also shows for the first time the sketches for five iconic looks Madonna wore on the stage at the O2 this past weekend: three of them are created by Justin Teodoro, the illustrator in the tour Costume Department, while the other two are from Jean Paul Gaultier and Atelier Versace respectively.

Vogue explains that for the most part Yohannes and Melssen created and designed the costumes for Madonna costumes themselves, but given the magnitude of the show the also enlisted top-tier fashion designers such as Donatella Versace, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Dilara Findikoglu, who all created create special one-off looks for her. Yohannes and Melssen explain:

Fashion has always been a part of her storytelling, so we drew from her past stylistically, and we kept those themes within the costumes.

We wanted to reference everything that she’s done, and make something new out of that. We created a whole new world.

Yohannes and Melssen began their research by looking at Madonna’s polaroids and performances from the 80’s era. Yohannes tells Vogue:

There were a lot of grunge and punk kids, but also the New Romantics. This section feels like being at a New York club, where all of these different cultures meld together.

Dilara Findikoglu is responsible for punky tailcoat that Madonna wears during Everybody, in the first act of the show, a piece inspired by an archival blazer she wore during a performance in Japan back in the ’80s. Yohannes explains:

It was a men’s coat that she got from a vintage store. [For the new one,] we tricked it out, and added memorabilia and pins from the ’80s onto it. It was very much an ode to New York in the ’80s.

In act two the shows moves to the ’90s and the two costume designers tell the magazine that they wanted to explore the themes of sexual expression and liberation that the song in the setlist bring to the show.

We had an idea to make it about boxing. The dancers are all dressed in boxing clothes, and M is in a boxing robe—but then there’s this beautiful sensuality when she unveils a slip dress.

In act two Madonna also performs Vogue – the song: one of her biggest hits that also brought some of her best looks on the live stage. For the song, Madonna and her team asked her friend designer Jean Paul Gaultier to create a new, contemporary version of the iconic Blond Ambition Tour cone bra. In 2012, for Madonna’s MDNA Tour, Gaultier played with the idea of a blending a suit and a corset, blurring masculine and feminine, with the corset eventually turning into a cage.
This time around, Gaultier created a black cone mini dress, encrusted with black crystals. Melssen explains:

It would not be a show without Gaultier. He just knows her body and how she wants to feel. [Madonna] couldn’t imagine doing this without having [him.]

The looks for act three, focused on the 2010s, take the lead from Don’t Tell Me and its western-inspired fashion style, punctuated with a cowboy hat made by Ruslan Baginskiy, and a pair of custom Miu Miu cowboy boots, while in act four Madonna moves into futurism, and rocks a special, foiled-Mylar Versace catsuit. Yohannes and Melssen explain:

Versace made a silhouette that Madonna has never really worn before – a catsuit – made in the pattern of broken glass.

When the light hits this catsuit, it looks like armor.

Melssen and Yohannes also explain that in building this wardrobe they had to consider functionality and movement as well as aesthetics.

She changes a lot in the show, so we needed to make sure that the clothes were quick-rigged. There are center back zips on almost all of the costumes, so she can go in and out pretty quickly. There’s a lot of under-dressing as well. She wears costumes underneath each other, [to be ready] for the next number.

For the final number of the show, all of the Madonna dancers wear various replica looks from her archive. Johannes explains how they worked on this idea.

For a lot of these looks, [Madonna] still had them in her archives, so we went to look at them and matched the fabrics and embroidery.

She is involved in every single process of the costume design. She looks at all the fabrics, sketches, and buttons. She cares about who the characters are, and the clothes telling that story.

With the show now ready to travel across Europe and North America, Eyob Yohannes and Rita Melssen hope that the fans at the concerts will see that Madonna vision come to life. Melssen says:

I hope people realize how much of an artist she is. I also just hope that they feel seen and have fun!

Read the full story and check out five amazing costume sketches on the online website of Vogue.