“Two hours of exercise, seven days a week –including a killer program of biking 25 miles, then running five sets of 100 stairs.” Laid out in extensive detail in a 1988 edition of Vogue, much has been made of Madonna’s relationship with exercise and the impossible physique it continues to whittle. In 1998, she would be invited onto daytime television to demonstrate sun salutations. In 2008, the paparazzi would camp outside her private-use gym in Holland Park. And in 2018, Madonna performed “Like A Prayer” at the Met Gala, fittingly themed around the term “Heavenly Bodies”.
The fascination that collects around Madonna’s musculature has (at times) been equal to her music. Sculpted and sinuous with rope-like veins, she has “The Best Arms In Hollywood”, even as she embarks on a world tour at the age of 65. That the media should pore over a woman’s figure is, of course, unremarkable, but the extreme lengths to which Madonna has gone to maintain a spring-loaded, athletic build might speak to a deeper raison d’etre. “Her message of self-determination and brute vitality needed a physical, transmissible form,” as writer Michelle Orange said in an article published earlier this month. “And we agreed to believe that the camera only appeared to be feasting on her –that she would emerge from each feat of aesthetic derring-do intact and primed for the next.”
I was reminded of those words this week, when Madonna pressed play on a 78-date spectacle that will take her from the O2 in London to the Palacio De Los Deportes in Mexico. Much will inevitably be written about her spiral bras by Jean Paul Gaultier and catsuits by Versace and corsets by Dilara Fındıkoğlu for the tour– clothes carefully chosen to linger in our collective memory – but it’s her sweat-slicked moments, far, far away from the stage and bedraggled by exercise, that are often the most interesting, fashion-wise. Before Hailey and Kaia and Kendall’s gym looks (all sensible tote bags and shapewear), there she was: tricked out in rhinestone tracksuits and black-out sunglasses, iPods and Blackberrys and house keys clenched in one superhuman fist.
Here, we roll back the tape on some of Madonna’s most memorable workouts, to a time pre-Yoga With Adrienne, where ballet flats and pirate booties came into alliance with Boy London and Ed Hardy.
