Red-carpet theatrics are a popular sport for Madonna, who likes to part the sea of ubiquitous mermaid gowns with attention-grabbing ensembles. She wore a sari with bare feet to collect the first ever Versace Award at the VH1 Fashion Awards in 1998. “She’s outrageous, she’s provocative, she’s inscrutable and over the years we’ve all been witness to her evolution from street-smart kid sister to virgin bride, from a sex goddess to yogini,” said Sting, who co-presented the award with Donatella Versace. “Her mind is as celebrated as her body, she’s as feared as she is desired. She leads while others follow.” The most recent Grammy Awards saw her sporting thigh boots and a matador-inspired Givenchy Couture bodysuit, cheekily flipping its jet-encrusted skirt to bare her fishnetted derriere to the paps. “Be perfectly content to be who you are, someone unique and rare and fearless,” she announced before her performance of new single Living For Love.

Rebel heart

Despite now being in her sixth decade, the provocateur queen of pop – whose latest album, Rebel Heart, is released this month, its cover showing Madonna’s face lashed with S&M-style black cords – hasn’t kicked her habit of exposing body parts. She first posed nude as an unknown, then in her all-star Sex book and on Gaultier’s catwalk in 1992. The button-pushing performer showed a nipple during a concert in Istanbul on her 2012 MDNA world tour, days later flashing her bottom at a concert in Rome. Commentators have thus become more concerned with the age-appropriateness of her actions and garb than any political correctness. “She looks like she’s done 10th grade 48 times,” quipped the late Joan Rivers apropos her cheerleader-style Super Bowl half-time show outfit on a 2012 episode of Fashion Police. “(Her ever-youthful style has always been fodder for comics, with Jennifer Saunders notably spoofing the singer’s Hung Up combination of retro leotard and Farrah Fawcett hair flicks.)

“Is there a rule? Are people just supposed to die when they’re 40?” she asked in a 1992 interview with Jonathan Ross at the tender age of 34. In a recent Q&A with Rolling Stone, for whose cover she struck a Marilyn pin-up pose, she takes on ageism in pop culture and beyond. “It’s still the one area where you can totally discriminate against somebody,” she notes. “[Regarding] my age – anybody and everybody would say something degrading to me. And I always think to myself, why is that accepted? What’s the difference between that and racism, or any discrimination? They’re judging me by my age. I don’t understand. I’m trying to get my head around it. Because women, generally, when they reach a certain age, have accepted that they’re not allowed to behave a certain way. But I don’t follow the rules. I never did, and I’m not going to start.”

“When I did my Sex book, it wasn’t the average,” she adds. “When I performed Like a Virgin on the MTV Awards and my dress went up and my ass was showing, it was considered a total scandal. It was never the average, and now it’s the average. When I did Truth or Dare [aka In Bed with Madonna] and the cameras followed me around, it was not the average. So if I have to be the person who opens the door for women to believe and understand and embrace the idea that they can be sexual and look good and be as relevant in their fifties or their sixties or whatever as they were in their twenties, then so be it.”