The 5 best high fashion looks in MTV video clips From Versace's baby-doll in "Crazy in Love" to Gucci thongs in "Jenny from the Block"
Long gone are the days when discovering an artist's favorite designers had to wait for an interview in glossy-cover magazines or Joan Rivers' biting comments on E! Entertainment. Those were the years of low rise jeans, glitter, celebrity obsession, and a sensuality crystallized in the MTV schedule, in whose video rotations outfits made the character, but the garments and the stylists who assembled them remained a well-kept secret. Back then, the looks may have been iconic, but without social media, the individual items the it-girls of the time wore fell relatively silent. Recently, student and researcher Nathan Capistrano hailing from Manila, Philippines, has started to do an incredible research work through social media and especially through Twitter with his page @muglerize deconstructing, video after video and appearance after appearance, the best looks from video clips of the 2000s, making us discover that the symbiosis between fashion and entertainment is by no means new in these years and that iconic pieces by equally iconic designers have coexisted with us even when we were teenagers in a pre-Instagram and pre-Tik Tok world. This is precisely why we contacted Nathan Capistrano to ask him to collaborate with us on this first exploration of fashion within the world of Y2K music.
His research, as we and the audience had already seen on @muglerize, was unimpeachable and so here are the 5 best high fashion looks seen in MTV video clips.
Britney Spears, Lucky (2000)
"Hung Up", directed by Johan Renck, holds the distinction of being the first video clip to reach the 100 million view mark on YouTube and sees Madonna inside a gymnasium performing some dance moves, despite having just come back from a rather serious fall from a horse. It is an obvious reference to Saturday Night Fever (1977), in which the contrast between rhythmic images and slow motion editing involve the viewer in a sensual dance. The fuchsia-coloured, 1970s-style leotard has become the symbol of 'Confessions on a Dancefloor', paired with a vintage pink sequin dance belt and sparkling Gina Shoes pumps. In the last scene, however, the star sports a vintage black leather hooded jacket, Prada jeans, black leather Yves Saint Laurent boots by Tom Ford, and a dark green vintage 1970s Danskin bodysuit by The Way We Wore. Fun fact: the hooded jacket worn by Lady Germanotta was purchased by assistant Arianne Phillips 7 years before the video shoot.
