#marlenestewart

[celeb2day]

VMAs flashback! Madonna's costumer reveals backstory for iconic 1990 look

[mtwy]

Bop

USA November 1985

Bop Magazine (for some reason published 2 months ahead of its cover date on September 17th) did a layout promoting Madonna’s Wazoo clothing line, designed by Marlene Stewart.

[mtwy]

The Orlando Sentinel

USA September 8th 1985

If someone’s wedding shoes were described to you as “encrusted with pearls and antique appliques,” who would you think of?

Madonna? Right.

Described by designer Marlene Stewart as “a sort of cross between Cinderella and The Wizard of Oz,” Madonna’s shoes fit right in with the ensemble she wore when she wed Sean Penn last month.

In designing the dress, Stewart chose an ivory colored ballerina silhouette, embroided with pink and silver thread. Instead of a veil, Madonna wore a black bowler hat. The famous rhinestone crosses were not in evidence.

Stewart, who designed all the things Madonna wore on her Virgin Tour as well as her wedding clothes - and who, indeed, is responsible for a large part of Madonna’s much publicisized style - has so far remained in the background. “Especially when the tour was going on, Women’s Wear Daily and other papers were calling me up,” she says, “but I just thought in working with Madonna, that it’s important to keep it low key.”

The designer will step into the foreground next month, however, when she introduces “Madonna”, an inexpensive ($35 to $85) line of clothes based on designs she did for the tour.

Stewart started designing for the singer with the Material Girl video in January. “They had sort of an open call for stylists, so I brought my book over,” she says. “It was totally ridiculous, all messy with fabric swatches, not a typical stylist’s book at all with nice, clean magazine tear sheets.” But Madonna and her associates were impressed and enough to decide they wanted a designer instead of simply a stylist.

Although Stewart created several outfits for that video, the one everyone remembers is the strapless pink gown with matching gloves. It was modeled after the dress Marilyn Monroe wore in the “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” number in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

“Of course, the biggest problem was the difference in choreography,” Stewart says. While Monroe took little mincing steps in high heels, Madonna’s movements were so flamboyant that they would have been better suited to a leotard. 

“When I saw the choreography, I thought, “Oh, my God,” Stewart recalls. “Because the dress was a typical ‘50′s dress - you go one way and it goes another.......They just kept doing takes, and I kept pulling the dress back up.”

Madonna was pleased, though, and asked Stewart to do all the clothes for the tour, an enterprise the designer describes as a joint effort.

“A lot of designers like to say, ‘This is my design,’” Stewart says. “But I’ve gotten a chance to collaborate, which is definitely more fun.”

Madonna would first ask Stewart for her ideas, then add some of her own. “She definitely liked turquoise and this certain ‘50′s kind of green. I stayed in the lower-hip kind of thing and exposed midriff for the silhouettes. To me, that look has been around. It’s a dancer’s look, basically. What we did was made it more visible.”

But all the clothes accomodate Madonna’s curvy body. “There are certain things you have to design around. I don’t do skimpy geometric shapes that are backless for her, because everything has to have some support.”

Under the influence of Stewart, Madonna began to change her Desperately Seeking Susan look of black on black lace and leather to a softer, more romantic style. For the tour, Stewart used a lot of ornate brocaded and beaded fabrics, many of them left over from ‘30′s and ‘40′s designs created by the Hollywood costumer Adrian.

“I’m really sorry people didn’t have a chance to see those clothes up close,” says Stewart. “It was like an old Cher TV show - she’d go back and change five or six times. Some of those clothes I wish I would have had myself.

Stewart’s new collection which give Madonna’s teen-aged fans a chance to dress authentically likes their idol, grew out of Boy Toy, a small line of T-shirts, blouses and skirts that were in stores a few months ago.

The clothes are manufactured by EMMC, a company that franchises T-shirts imprinted with names and pictures of rock stars. When Madonna expressed interest in coming out with a line of clothes, the company approached Stewart to expand the Boy Toy line into a full-fledged collection. It includes the familiar looks - bra tops under T-shirts, narrow skirts that expose the midriff, psychedelic prints - and a new one, tight pants that close with bra hooks on the fly.

Stewart, a petite woman in her 30′s, had been designing her own line of trendy sportswear and dresses for seven years when she closed the business last year to design for movies and commercials. Her collection, called Marlene Stewart for Covers, was known in the garment industry for its black lace cocktail dresses.

“I wish last year, in a way, I’d been in business,” she says, pulling out a 1982 magazine featuring one of her sexy, Madonna-like designs. “I did really well, but there wasn’t the same rage for lace then. When you do something all of a sudden it becomes a trend, that’s when you make money.”

Stewart grew up in Boston and Miami and has a master’s degree in European history from the University of California at Berkley. While in college, she flew regularly to Europe with psychedelic American clothes to sell.

“I had never thought of becoming a designer. It was just something I did better than anything else,” Stewart says. “And if you have a liberal-arts degree, there’s not much you can do with it besides have a conversation about Louis XVI at dinner.” After leaving Berkley, she studied design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and moved to Los Angeles in 1978 to start her own business.

Stewart works out of her West Hollywood apartment, which is filled with antiques, design sketches and Polaroids of Madonna trying on clothes for fittings. She is realistic enough not to expect that her association with Madonna will make her a household name, she says.

“I guess I’ve been doing this so long it doesnt seem as though anything is going to make that much difference. Anyway, I’m hoping to relocate to London and live half the year there. It’s the only place I can go to get inspired. Paris fashion is gorgeous, but I really feel English fashion is not as derivative. It doesn’t hold up, and you might not always be able to wear it, but it gets you thinking.”