Madonna performs in a cone bra corset designed by Jean Paul Gaultier, 1990
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The pop culture legacy
Madonna's cone bra corset, designed by Jean Paul Gaultier, has gone down as one of the most iconic music-meets-fashion moments in history, and, in 1990, it was an important milestone for female liberation. In her book ‘The Fashion Universe of Jean Paul Gaultier', Suzy Menkes writes: "The burgeoning sexual freedom of women, seeded in the 1960s, culminated in Gaultier's costume design for Madonna's 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour. This rebel-with-a-corset moment was when runway and stage merged, bringing to a global public the vision of the conical bra that the designer had revealed first on the catwalk in the early 1980s." In 2012, the corset sold for $52,000 in Christie's Pop Culture auction.