“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 has whittled. 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, she performed “Like A Prayer” at the Met Gala, fittingly themed around the term “Heavenly Bodies”.
Sculpted and sinuous with rope-like veins, the public fascination with Madonna’s musculature has (at times) been equal to her music. She was described as owning “The Best Arms in Hollywood”, even at 60. 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 also speak to a deeper raison d’etre. “Her message of self-determination and brute vitality needed a physical, transmissible form,” as writer Michelle Orange put it in a New Yorker article published in October 2023. “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 when Madonna travelled from the O2 in London to the Palacio De Los Deportes in Mexico on her 78-date (let’s face it, farewell) Celebration tour in late 2023 and early 2024. Much was written about the spiral Jean Paul Gaultier bras and Versace catsuits and Dilara Fındıkoğlu corsets she wore during the spectacle – looks that rode on the charged showgirl costuming of her Confessions, Blonde Ambition and Girlie Show eras, and happily thumbed the nose at the notion of age-appropriate dressing – but it’s her sweat-slicked moments that have occurred far from the stage that are, to me, often the most interesting.
Before Hailey and Kaia and Kendall’s gym looks – all sensible tote bags, shapewear and dad trainers – there she was: tricked out in rhinestone Ed Hardy tracksuits and black-out sunglasses, her iPods and Blackberrys and house keys clenched in one superwoman fist while she was under the tutelage of celebrity trainer Tracy Anderson in the 2000s. And even before Vogue’s Olivia Allen espoused the freedom of wearing an “old pyjama T-shirt from 2008” (as opposed to what she described as “bum-sculpting leggings”) to exercise, there was Madonna: in an array of oversize Mac and Absolut Vodka T-shirts, bike shorts, wind suits, thick white socks, and logo hats while running alongside her personal trainer Robert Parr in the 1990s.
On her 67th birthday, we roll back the tape on some of Madonna’s most memorable workout fits, to a time pre-Yoga With Adriene, when bell-bottomed Juicy Couture tracksuits came into strange alliance with Vivenne Westwood Pirate boots.