How Madonna's Haider Ackermann for Tom Ford Met Gala Look Came Together in Just 3 Weeks
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience.
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience.
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Generate Key Takeaways
On Monday, Madonna made her return to the Met Gala after a seven-year hiatus. For this year's theme of 'tailored for you,' Madonna wore a Tom Ford by Haider Ackermann: a cream double-breasted tuxedo in peached silk, complete with a crisp white piqué plastron shirt paired with a white piqué bow tie. The look was finished off with jewels by Diamonds Direct.
It almost wasn't even a reality, says Madonna's stylist Rita Melssen.
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'She actually wasn't going to go, it wasn't even really on her radar. And then someone brought it up to her, and of course she was like, 'this is an incredible theme and I want to support and I want to show up,' Melssen says. 'We did some really deep, deep dives, deep research, got really into Black dandy over the decades. What did that look like from the 1800s into the 2000s and all the different iterations and versions of it. Her and I really just sat down. We shared feedback, we shared images. It was a really collaborative process between the both of us.'
Melssen felt there were any number of directions they could go in when it came to a designer to work with, until someone sent her an image of Madonna's iconic 1995 VMA look wearing a Tom Ford for Gucci blue silk button-down shirt.
'I was like, 'wait, Haider just had this incredible, incredible season and the first collection [at Tom Ford], and I had actually met him when he came to her tour in Paris.'
Madonna
She gave him a call and the response was an immediate 'yes.'
'He has such a deep reverence for M and everything she stood for. Haider also is adopted, and she has four adopted children. And so there was a really deep connection there. Haider also grew up in Africa, and M obviously does so much work in Africa and Malawi and with her charities, so there was already sort of this overlap and connection there,' Melssen says. 'When I called him he was like, 'I want to make her just so powerful and elegant and show just the essence of who she is.''
The whole look came together in just about three weeks. The look drew inspiration from Gladys Bentley, a Black lesbian blues singer in New York City in the 1920s.
'Gladys Bentley was one of the original Black female dandies. She was a performer in Harlem around the Harlem Renaissance, and she used to wear these incredible white suits, like a white tail coat, white shirt, white hat, white pants,' Melssen says. 'And she was a Black lesbian during that time, which was unheard of. And so she really pushed a lot of boundaries and she made people see gender and identity in a very different way and was really a trailblazer in that way.'
Haider Ackermann and Madonna
Madonna was immediately interested in Bentley as a reference when Melssen suggested the idea.
'Of course it's very different, don't get me wrong. But there's just so many ways in which when M was coming up, she also challenged gender identity and what a woman can and can't do, also in reverence to all the women that came before her,' Melssen says. 'In her own way, M is a dandy, to have this audacity to push boundaries and to push people to think of her and women in general in a very different way.'
The first time Madonna tried the look on for Melssen and Ackermann and the Tom Ford team, the whole room knew it was the one.
'Haider was standing next to me and the literal hairs on his arms raised and he had goosebumps,' Melssen says. 'So we all slept well that night.'
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'I Don't Understand You': Nick Kroll, Andrew Rannells movie inspired by adoption fraud story from filmmakers
While Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells voice some pretty hysterical characters in Big Mouth, they're now sharing the screen in the horror-comedy I Don't Understand You (now in theatres). Written and directed by married filmmakers David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano, the movie had a particularly interesting starting point. In I Don't Understand You Kroll and Rannells play a couple, Dom and Cole, who have just fallen victim to adoption fraud, but things are looking up. A pregnant woman named Candace (Amanda Seyfried) thinks they're the right fit for the family to adopt her child. But just before that happens, Dom and Cole take a romantic Italian vacation. Things take a turn when they get lost outside of Rome, trying to find a restaurant. As their stranded in an unknown location, the trip turns to bloody Italian chaos. 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"And it was just a very trusting process, because neither of us are fluent enough to have that kind of dialectical specificity that you would in English." "It was super cool to just be watching an actor perform a scene that you've written in English that has been translated a couple of times, but you still completely understand it, just by the generosity of their performance." For Craig, he has an extensive resume of acting roles, including projects like Boy Erased and episodes of Dropout. Among the esteemed alumni of the Upright Citizens Brigade, he had a writing "itch" for a long time, and was "in awe" of Crano's work as a director. "Truthfully, in a weird way, it felt like such a far off, distant job, because everything felt really difficult, and I think with this project it just made me understand that it was just something I truly love and truly wanted to do," Craig said. "I love the idea of creative control and being in a really collaborative situation. 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"And it's very helpful in an environment where you're getting a lot of no's, to have a partner who's literally like, 'Oh, it's just no for now. Great, let's move on. Let's find somebody who's going to say yes, maybe we'll come back to that no later.' I'm the pessimist who's sitting in the corner going, 'Somebody just rejected me, I don't know what to do.' ... It just makes you move, and that's that's very helpful for me."
Yahoo
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It feels abrupt, but it's that jolt of the contrast that also makes that moment feel particularly impactful to watch. "Our sense of filmmaker is so much based on surprise, Craig said. "As a cinephile, my main decade to go to are outlandish '90s movies, because they just take you to a different space, and as long as you have a reality to the characters that are already at hand, you can kind of take them wherever." "Personally, the situation of adoption was a constant jolt [from] one emotion to another that we felt like that was the right way to tell a story like this, which was literally, fall in love with a couple and then send them into a complete nightmare. And I think you can only get that way if you do it abruptly, and kind of manically." While Rannells and Kroll have that funny and sweet chemistry the story needs, these were roles that weren't written for them. But it works because Crano and Craig know how to write in each other's voices so well, that's where a lot of the dialogue is pulled from. Additionally, the filmmakers had the "creative trust" in each other to pitch any idea, as random as it may have seemed, to see if it could work for the film. "When you're with somebody you've lived with for 15 years, there is very little that I can do that would embarrass me in front of David," Crano said. "So that level of creative freedom is very generative." "We were able to screw up in front of each other a lot without it affecting the rest of our day," Craig added. Of course, with the language barrier between the filmmakers and the Italian cast, it was a real collaboration to help make the script feel authentic for those characters. "All of the Italian actors and crew were very helpful in terms of being like, 'Well I feel like my character is is from the south and wouldn't say it in this way.' And helped us build the language," Crano said. 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"And it's very helpful in an environment where you're getting a lot of no's, to have a partner who's literally like, 'Oh, it's just no for now. Great, let's move on. Let's find somebody who's going to say yes, maybe we'll come back to that no later.' I'm the pessimist who's sitting in the corner going, 'Somebody just rejected me, I don't know what to do.' ... It just makes you move, and that's that's very helpful for me."
Yahoo
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