The year: 2005. The magazine: Vogue. The conceit: Madonna, married to Guy Richie and living in a bucolic countryside manse in Wiltshire, had become a folksy lady of the gentry, with her chintz and her jodhpurs and the cliche pack of chickens. Madonna, of course, carried this theme to the extreme and started faking an English lilt and showing up places dressed in velvet livery. She looks like she’s going on a Tudor fox hunt, where during a mead break she will bust out her piccolo. But hindsight is a gift; Pandemic Madonna has been so unpleasant that I yearn for this pretense. PLEASE don your pantaloons and skip around in a circle playing “Greensleeves” on a recorder. I beg of thee.
