Madonna

Madonna, the American singer born Madonna Louise Ciccone on August 16, 1958, in Bay City, Michigan, belongs in lingerie history for one costume above all: the cone-bra corset that Jean Paul Gaultier made for her 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour. It put a piece of foundation wear, styled on a 1950s shape, at the center of the biggest pop show of its year.

Lace and fishnets on the Virgin Tour

Her taste for underwear on show started earlier. On her 1985 Virgin Tour her look of lace tops, skirts over capri pants, fishnet stockings, crucifixes and stacked bracelets became one of the defining female fashions of the decade, widely associated with 1980s female fashion. At the first MTV Video Music Awards in 1984 she performed "Like a Virgin" in a wedding gown and white gloves, appearing atop a large wedding cake and moving across the stage in a provocative manner that made the performance notorious.

Gaultier was already in her orbit. For the 1985 premiere of "Desperately Seeking Susan" she wore a skirt with men's suspenders bought from him.

Chiba, April 13, 1990

The Blond Ambition tour opened on April 13, 1990, at Chiba Marine Stadium in Japan and ran for 57 shows across Asia, Europe and North America, ending in Nice on August 5. Gaultier designed the costumes. Two conical corsets were made, one in peach-toned satin and one in gold. In the opening sequence the satin cones pushed through slits in a black Gaultier suit, so the audience saw the lingerie emerge from menswear.

Gaultier's cone, the 1940s bullet bra

The shape was not new. The bullet bra was invented in the 1940s and was the standard silhouette of the "sweater girl" pin-ups of the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s, before softer bras took over. Gaultier had been showing cone-breasted designs in his own collections through the 1980s. What Madonna added was scale: a stadium audience and a camera crew. The tour film, "Madonna: Truth or Dare", grossed more than $15 million.

Toronto and the Vatican

The tour was attacked more for its sexual and religious content than for the clothes. Toronto police warned that she could be arrested over the "Like a Virgin" number, Pope John Paul II urged Catholics to boycott, and one Italian date was cancelled. The show went on unchanged and grossed more than $62.7 million.

Corsets as a working wardrobe

The cone corset became a museum object. One original sold at auction in 2001 for more than $21,000, and the ArkDes museum in Stockholm displayed one in its 2013 Gaultier exhibition. Madonna kept returning to the corset and to Gaultier: he dressed her 2006 Confessions Tour and made corsets for the 2012 MDNA Tour and the 2023 Celebration Tour. Her 1992 book "Sex", photographed by Steven Meisel, pushed the same imagery into print. Thirty-three years after Chiba, the cone was still part of the act.

Last updated October 7, 2026