Madonna continues to be criticized for her style

Madonna continues to be criticized for her style

Reaction to the 64-year-old pop icon has been overwhelmingly critical. This is not surprising.

Singer Madonna appeared at the Grammy Awards wearing a black tuxedo suit, her eyebrows bleached blonde and her cheeks plump and smooth. Not everyone understood it.

One reaction on Twitter went something like this: 'Looks like he's had a face transplant.'

Someone said: 'Madonna gets the 'New Face' award at the 2023 Grammy Awards!'

Who said: 'This is not the Madonna I remember.'

As of Monday morning, multiple news outlets have declared Madonna 'unrecognizable'. He was busy asking plastic surgeons for their opinion on a woman whom they had never treated.

Reaction to the 64-year-old pop icon has been overwhelmingly critical. This is not surprising. Madonna has long been a 'punching bag' for 'glaring offences' such as not being young, publicly expressing her sexuality and not looking the same as when she first became famous half a century ago. This is not an exaggeration.

In 1993, Smash Hits magazine carried a picture of her performing at Wembley Stadium with the words 'Calm down Grandma'. 

This attitude has continued through every phase of Madonna's career. In the 2000s, she was heavily criticized for her arms. The American website 'TMZ' described them as 'arms of veins full of blood'.

Another post described them as 'horrific muscular arms (which) were reattached to the skeletal remains of a dead cow'. In the music video for her 2006 track 'Sorry', she was seen roller-skating alongside young and handsome male dancers.

Many of the song's album visuals show Madonna, 47, in a cheetah-print dress, walking around a dance studio, mingling with ripped-clad dancers in the street.

This was not particularly interesting for this era of music videos, yet she was acquitted of being 'too old' for such portrayals. By 2016, criticism of Madonna's appearance had shifted to her arms, which magazines described as extremely 'veiny' and 'wrinkled'.

Few weeks seem to go by without Madonna being mocked or abused. Earlier this month TV host Lorraine Kelly crudely likened her face to 'a hard-boiled egg' while Piers Morgan, who has always had a strange dislike for Madonna, claimed that she would become the star with 'the strangest, doomed embarrassment in the history of world entertainment'.

It has long been acceptable to say incredibly vicious things about him in public, while few celebrities ever speak up in his defense.

Ultimately, we seem to prefer older women's individuality and deny them the right to be aggressive, unpredictable or risk-taking. Women who refuse, as Madonna always does, shut up.

That's why critics like Morgan are constantly offended by Madonna's expressions on social media or describe her modern work as strained or calculated rather than a natural extension of her interests. He has recently experimented with musical genres such as rap and Cape Verdean batik, while his latest single 'Back It Up To The Beat' was released at a faster tempo for maximum Tik Tok appeal. Which went viral.

He also continues to work with young artists.

What's also amazing about Madonna's boxing match with age-standards for sexual expression is that she's one of the first pop icons to come out to us in public. While many famous singers may have retired to a life of comfort or stayed away from re-releases of old hits – many of her peers such as Prince, Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston are long dead – Madonna is a work in progress. remains a performing artist, who is still interested in pushing the boundaries of sound and working with new sounds.

And what if they are doing it?

Madonna seems unfazed by the criticism leveled at herself. In a New York Times interview published in 2019, he suggested that journalist Vanessa Gregoridis was too focused on the concept of age. Madonna told them: 'Stop thinking. Just live your life and don't be influenced by society, which tries to give you some sense of age or what you're supposed to do.'

To the dismay of Madonna's detractors, this has always been her approach: 'Be stubborn, be strong, never break in the public eye.'

Madonna compared self-criticism on Instagram to a 'crime'. She said: 'You can't win (as an older woman). A great (photo) will get you more followers but it will also get you more opposition and criticism. You are in this ridiculous position.'

But she has also been in that 'funny spot' for most of her career. A 35-year-old woman called 'Grandma', a 64-year-old woman called 'Boiled Egg'. She shrugs through all this criticism. It is good for them.