Vogue, the Song that Covered a Culture and Soundtracked The Devil Wears Prada
In 1990, Madonna released a song that wasn’t supposed to be a single. It was a B-side throwaway, recorded in a basement studio in Manhattan with a $5,000 budget and a vocal booth converted from a closet. It became one of the best-selling singles of the year, hit number one in over 30 countries, and 35 years later, it still soundtracks the most iconic fashion moments on screen — from Andy Sachs’ Paris montage in The Devil Wears Prada to the teaser trailer of its 2026 sequel.
But Vogue isn’t just a Madonna song. It’s the story of a culture. Voguing was invented in Harlem in the 1970s and 1980s by Black and Latino LGBTQ+ kids who had been thrown out of their homes, building chosen families called Houses, competing in underground ballroom competitions, and turning fashion poses into a dance language. Names you may not know — Crystal LaBeija, Willi Ninja, Hector Xtravaganza, Jose Gutierez, Luis Camacho — built the entire visual world that Madonna would later put on MTV.
In this episode of Uncovering the Cover, we trace Vogue’s journey from the ballroom floor to the global pop charts, into Paris Is Burning, onto the Blond Ambition Tour, through Pose, and onto the runway of The Devil Wears Prada 2. We ask the question that has followed the song for three and a half decades: was Madonna an ambassador, or was she an extractor? And we tell the story of the people who built the dance she would make immortal.
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DISCLAIMER:The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any artist, label, or organization mentioned. All music samples are used for educational and commentary purposes under fair use doctrine.
FULL TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
“It was supposed to be a B-side.”
[beat]
“A throwaway. A song they didn’t even want to release as a single. Recorded in a basement studio with a $5,000 budget. The vocal booth was a converted closet.”
[beat — 909 hi-hat enters]
“It became one of the best-selling singles of 1990. Number one in over 30 countries.”
[beat]
“And 35 years later, it is still the song they reach for every time Hollywood wants to sell you fashion. The first Devil Wears Prada in 2006. The teaser trailer for the sequel in 2025. The full trailer that broke records during the 2026 Grammys.”
[beat]
“Same song. Every time.”
[Music swells]
“But here’s what most people don’t know.”
“Madonna didn’t invent Vogue. She didn’t invent voguing. She didn’t even invent the title.”
“All of it — the dance, the poses, the swagger, the strut — was created by Black and Latino kids in Harlem who were thrown out of their houses for being queer.”
[beat]
“They built families they called ‘Houses.’ They competed in underground ballrooms. They invented an entire language. And one night, Madonna walked into a club in New York, watched two of them dance, and decided to put it on MTV.”
[beat]
“What happened next is one of the most contested stories in pop music history. A culture went global. A community got partial credit. A song became immortal. And the dancers who taught Madonna the moves — some of them never got rich. Some of them died of AIDS before the royalty checks were even cashed.”
[Music drops out completely]
“This is the real story of how Vogue became the most powerful song in fashion. And the cost of getting it there.”
[Theme music — Uncovering the Cover bumper]
[Standard Show Intro]
“Welcome to Uncovering the Cover, the podcast that explores the hidden stories behind music’s greatest transformations. Today, we have the story of Vogue — a song which started as a throwaway B-side, took an entire underground queer culture global in three minutes and 19 seconds, and became the song that has soundtracked the fashion industry’s self-image for 35 years and counting.”
3. Full Episode Script
Target runtime: 32–38 minutes. Three acts. Each act opens with a clip-ready hook and closes with a cliffhanger. Hook boxes are embedded throughout the script for short-form video extraction. All stage directions in italicized brackets.
ACT ONE: The Underground
Approx. 10–12 minutes
ACT 1 OPENING HOOK: The biggest pop song of 1990 was supposed to be thrown in the trash. They were going to put it on the B-side of a single nobody remembers. Then a producer in a basement studio said: “This is too good to lose.” And he saved one of the most important songs of the decade. But the song was only the second-most important thing happening that night. The first — was where the song came from.
Let me set the scene. December 1989. Madonna is 31 years old. She is the biggest pop star on the planet. She has just had 16 consecutive top-five singles in the United States — a record. No artist in history has ever done that.
But there is a small problem. Her last single, “Oh Father,” only reached number 20. It was the first single to miss the top 10 since 1984. Five years of dominance, and the streak was broken.
Madonna and her label, Warner Bros., decide they need something to put on the B-side of her next single — a song called “Keep It Together” — just to make sure the release performs. They call up a remix producer named Shep Pettibone. Shep was the king of the dance remix. He had reworked songs by George Michael, Pet Shop Boys, New Order. He had a budget of $5,000.
Shep goes to a basement studio on West 56th Street in Manhattan. The studio is not even his. The vocal booth is a closet. They put bi-fold doors on it and called it a recording space. Madonna flies in from Los Angeles. She lands, gets into a car, gets to the studio, walks down the stairs, takes one look at this closet, and probably wonders what she has signed up for.
Shep had built the instrumental on his own. He used a Roland TR-909 drum machine. It was 116 beats per minute. House music. Disco. There was a two-bar bass loop, a synth pad, some house piano. It was finished in two weeks for almost no money.
Madonna walks into the closet. Sings the verses. First take. Sings the chorus. First take.
MIDSCRIPT HOOK — CLIP CANDIDATE: Madonna recorded one of the best-selling singles of 1990 in a closet, on the first take, for $5,000. And then she went home, and Shep was left finishing the song without her, because she didn’t even care enough to be there for the final mix. He called it a B-side. He said: “Who cares.” He gave it everything anyway. And that is how Vogue happened.
But here’s the part of the story almost nobody tells. Where did the title come from? Where did the spoken section about Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando come from? Where did Madonna get the idea for any of this in the first place?
A few months earlier, Madonna had walked into a New York nightclub. The accounts vary on which one — the Sound Factory, the Paradise Garage, somewhere in that orbit — and she had witnessed something she had never seen before.
Two young men were dancing on the floor in a way that didn’t look like dancing. It looked like a fashion shoot. They were striking poses, freezing, then exploding into precise hand and arm movements that imitated runway models. They duckwalked. They dropped to the floor. They contorted into shapes that looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics. They were doing battle — dancing against each other — and the people watching were screaming, judging, and reading them.
The dancers were Jose Gutierez and Luis Camacho. They were members of the House of Xtravaganza — a chosen family of mostly Latino performers who had built one of the most respected ball houses in New York City. The dance was called voguing.
Madonna was hypnotized.
She wanted to know everything about it. Where it came from. Who created it. How they trained. Within months, Jose and Luis would be on her tour. Within a year, they would be in her music video. Within two years, they would be on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards in Marie Antoinette costumes, voguing in front of 50 million people. But the dance they were doing — the world they came from — was older than any of them.
MIDSCRIPT HOOK — CLIP CANDIDATE: Madonna didn’t invent voguing. She watched two Dominican kids do it on a New York dance floor in 1989, and she knew within five seconds: “I’m putting that on MTV.”
To understand voguing, you have to go all the way back to the 1860s. Drag balls have existed in New York City since at least 1869, when the Hamilton Lodge in Harlem started hosting them. Drag was a working-class form of entertainment. Black queens, white queens, immigrants, performers — they would put on their best clothes and compete.
But by the 1960s, those balls had a problem. Black queens were rarely winning. White queens were preferred by the judges. Black performers would have to lighten their faces with white makeup just to be taken seriously.
In the late 1960s, a Black queen named Crystal LaBeija got tired of it. She walked out of a competition in protest, in front of everyone. And then, with her friend Lottie, she did something that would change queer American history. She started her own ball. She founded the House of LaBeija. She made a competition that was for and by Black and Latino queer people.
And that small act — of one woman saying “we will host our own” — created the modern ballroom scene.
Through the 1970s, more Houses were founded. The House of Dupree. The House of Pendavis. By the 1980s, the houses had multiplied. The House of Ninja, founded by a dancer named Willi Ninja. The House of Xtravaganza, founded in 1982 by a man named Hector Valle, and reorganized later as a primarily Latino house with members like Hector Xtravaganza, Jose Xtravaganza, and Venus Xtravaganza, whose tragic story you may have seen in Paris Is Burning.
A House was not just a dance crew. It was a family. The Mother and the Father were the elders. They took in young queer kids who had been kicked out of their homes by their biological families — a brutally common experience in the 1980s, when AIDS was decimating the gay community and shame was at its highest. The Houses fed these kids. Housed them. Taught them. They competed at balls in categories like Realness, Femme Queen, Banjee Boy, and a category called Vogue.
The dance had been called other things first. Pop, dip, and spin. It came out of breakdancing’s era, but instead of breakdancing’s acrobatics on the floor, voguing was about poses. Striking a pose like a model in a magazine — specifically, like a model in Vogue magazine. Hence the name.
And one dancer, more than any other, became the public face of the form. His name was William Roscoe Leake. He was born in Long Island in 1961. He grew up watching Fred Astaire and the Apollo Theater with his mother. He taught himself to dance. He took the name Willi Ninja, because his style was inspired by martial arts. He became Mother of the House of Ninja. People started calling him “the Godfather of Voguing.”
Willi Ninja taught children at the Christopher Street piers, late at night. He brought voguing to perfection. He took it to Europe. He taught Naomi Campbell how to walk a runway. And in 1989, before Madonna ever heard of any of this, an English producer named Malcolm McLaren made a song called “Deep in Vogue” that featured Willi Ninja in the music video. It was the first time the dance had been on a record.
But Malcolm McLaren’s song wasn’t a hit. It was a curiosity. It would take a different artist, with a different machine behind her, to take voguing global.
ACT 1 CLIFFHANGER: Willi Ninja brought voguing to perfection. Crystal LaBeija created the entire scene. Jose and Luis Xtravaganza were teaching it on the piers at night. And in December of 1989, all of them were unknown. By March of 1990 — four months later — their dance was the number one song on Earth. None of them saw it coming. And not one of them was ready for what came next.
ACT TWO: The Crossover
Approx. 11–13 minutes
ACT 2 OPENING HOOK: They brought a director nobody had heard of. They shot the video in black and white. They referenced photographers most pop fans had never heard of. The label thought they were crazy. They turned it into one of the greatest music videos ever made. The director’s name was David Fincher. He had never made a feature film.
When Vogue was finished, the label executives at Warner Bros. heard it for the first time. They lost their minds. “This is a number one smash record,” they said. “We’re not going to lose it as a B-side.” They pulled it off the back of “Keep It Together” and made it a single in its own right. They attached it to an album called I’m Breathless — which was technically the soundtrack to Madonna’s film Dick Tracy, even though Vogue had nothing to do with Dick Tracy.
The song needed a music video. And Madonna, even at this point in her career, had a remarkable instinct for picking directors. She gave the job to a 27-year-old commercial director named David Fincher. He had directed Madonna’s “Express Yourself” the year before. He had not yet directed a feature film. He would later make Se7en. Fight Club. The Social Network. He would become one of the defining filmmakers of his generation. But in 1990, he was a guy with a camera and a vision.
Fincher decided to shoot it in black and white. He pulled the visual references from the Golden Age of Hollywood photography — specifically two photographers named Horst P. Horst and Irving Penn. Both still alive at the time. Both legends of fashion photography. The video was a deliberate homage to a period of glamour the world had largely forgotten.
The choreography was credited to Jose Gutierez Xtravaganza and Luis Camacho Xtravaganza. They turned the video into a tutorial. Every pose, every hand gesture, every angular hold — it was a curriculum from the ballroom floor, transmitted in three minutes and 19 seconds to every TV set in the Western world.
MIDSCRIPT HOOK — CLIP CANDIDATE: David Fincher made the Vogue video before he ever made a movie. He referenced photographers nobody knew. He shot it in black and white in 1990 — a decade obsessed with color. And it won three MTV Video Music Awards.
The song needed a moment. And Madonna delivered it on September 6, 1990, at the MTV Video Music Awards. The performance is one of the most-replayed in MTV history. Madonna walked out in a Marie Antoinette gown — white wig, full 18th-century French court dress, a corset that she had been laced into. Jose and Luis came out in matching costumes as her gentlemen. They voguing through the entire performance.
It was Versailles meets Harlem. It was the most expensive ballroom set ever staged. And it told you exactly what Madonna had decided to do: she was going to take voguing — a dance born from poverty, from queerness, from race, from rejection — and put it on the most lavish stage available, dressed in the costumes of European royalty. The optics were either an act of artistic elevation, or an act of cultural extraction. People are still arguing about which.
Vogue went to number one in the United States, knocking Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” off the top of the chart. It went to number one in over 30 countries. It sold more than six million copies as a physical single — and to put that in perspective, that was the highest-selling single of all of 1990, in a year when the Pet Shop Boys, Mariah Carey, and Whitney Houston all had massive hits.
Madonna took it on tour. The Blond Ambition World Tour, which would become — thanks to Madonna’s decision to film backstage — the documentary Truth or Dare. Jose and Luis were on that tour. So were five other dancers, most of whom were gay, several of whom were HIV-positive. The tour was Madonna’s public manifesto on queer culture, on AIDS, on freedom of expression. She kissed dancers on stage. She talked about safer sex when most American politicians were still refusing to say the word AIDS in public.
MIDSCRIPT HOOK — CLIP CANDIDATE: Madonna brought voguing to MTV in a Marie Antoinette dress. The optics were Versailles meets Harlem. People are still arguing about whether it was elevation or extraction.
And here is where the timing gets unbelievable. While Vogue was still on the radio, while the Blond Ambition Tour was crossing Europe, a young white queer filmmaker from New York named Jennie Livingston was finishing a documentary she had been shooting for four years. The documentary was called Paris Is Burning. It went inside the actual Harlem ballrooms. It featured Pepper LaBeija. Dorian Corey. Willi Ninja. Octavia St. Laurent. Venus Xtravaganza. It captured the actual scene, in its actual rooms, with the actual people, in the actual costumes — not the polished, choreographed pop version Madonna was selling, but the raw, joyful, dangerous, devastating reality.
Paris Is Burning was released in 1990 and 1991. It went on to gross over $4 million on a tiny budget. It became one of the most influential queer documentaries in American history. It also became the source of one of the most uncomfortable conversations about exploitation in documentary filmmaking — because while the film made Livingston a celebrated filmmaker, several of her subjects threatened to sue, claiming they had not been compensated. Venus Xtravaganza was murdered before the film even came out. Willi Ninja would die of AIDS-related complications in 2006. Dorian Corey died in 1993, with a mummified body found in a trunk in her apartment closet — a story for another day, but worth knowing.
So the timing of Vogue is impossible to overstate. Madonna’s song dropped first. The MTV performance was first. The tour was first. Paris Is Burning came after. By the time the documentary hit theaters, Madonna had already taught the world what voguing looked like, and the world had moved on.
For the dancers in the actual scene, this was a complicated victory. On the one hand, voguing was on every TV set on Earth. The fashion industry started copying poses from balls. Donna Karan and Michael Kors started taking inspiration from ballroom kids. House of Xtravaganza members were getting modeling work. Naomi Campbell and Iman were learning runway technique from Willi Ninja.
On the other hand, the actual ballroom scene was being decimated. Not by stardom — by AIDS. The very community that had created voguing was being killed off in real time, while a song based on their dance was selling six million copies and putting almost none of that money back into the community.
ACT 2 CLIFFHANGER: In 1990, Vogue was the song of the year. The dancers who created the moves were touring the world. The ballroom culture was on the cover of every magazine. And in the same year — sometimes in the same week — some of those dancers were dying. The most extracted-from culture in pop music history was being killed by a virus the U.S. government refused to name. And the question that has followed Vogue for 35 years was just beginning to take shape: what do you owe the people whose work made you famous?
ACT THREE: The Long Shadow
Approx. 11–13 minutes
ACT 3 OPENING HOOK: Most pop songs have a six-month shelf life. Vogue has a 36-year stranglehold on culture. Every fashion week. Every drag show. Every Pose episode. Every time Hollywood wants to sell you elegance — they reach for the same 1990 single. The question is no longer why Vogue worked. It’s why nobody has been able to make a song that replaces it.
Let’s talk about the second life of Vogue. Because pop songs do not usually do what Vogue did.
Most number one hits have a moment. They peak, they cool down, they end up on a nostalgia compilation, and twenty years later you hear them in a CVS. Vogue did not do this. Vogue has been Madonna’s most-performed live song. Her current keyboardist Ric’key Pageot has said it has been on the setlist of every world tour Madonna has done since 2008. Every single one.
It was on the Sticky and Sweet Tour. The MDNA Tour. The Rebel Heart Tour. The Madame X Tour. The Celebration Tour. It is on streaming services with hundreds of millions of plays a year. It is the song the world reaches for whenever Madonna trends.
And then there’s the cover and sample lineage — because while Vogue is technically an original Madonna song, it has been re-recorded and re-interpreted by a stunning roster of artists. Bette Midler covered it on Broadway as part of a Hollywood-tribute show. The Glee cast covered it in 2010, and that version went to number 23 on the Billboard charts — a chart hit, twenty years after the original. Drag queens cover it in every major city in the world, every weekend. It has been mashed up with Britney Spears’ “I’m a Slave 4 U.” It has been remixed for every dance floor compilation released since 1991.
In 2012, the music publishing company VMG Salsoul sued Madonna and Shep Pettibone, claiming Vogue had sampled a horn part from a 1976 Salsoul Orchestra song called “Love Break” — a sample so subtle that VMG said it took 21 years and improved technology to detect. The case went to court. The judge ruled in Madonna’s favor. The verdict said no reasonable listener could even hear the sample, let alone recognize it as Salsoul’s work. Vogue stayed clean.
But the more interesting cover lineage isn’t about lawsuits. It’s about how the song has been absorbed into the cultural bloodstream. When Lady Gaga released “Born This Way” in 2011, the comparisons to Madonna were so loud that even Madonna herself made a comment. When Beyoncé released “Renaissance” in 2022, the album was a love letter to Black queer dance music, and ballroom culture was at the center of it. When Pose premiered on FX in 2018, the entire show was set in the ballroom world that Madonna had stepped into and out of.
MIDSCRIPT HOOK — CLIP CANDIDATE: Beyoncé made an entire album about ballroom culture in 2022. Lady Gaga’s biggest hit got compared to Vogue immediately. Pose ran for three seasons on FX. Every queer cultural moment of the last 15 years has been a footnote to a song Madonna recorded in a closet in 1989.
And then there’s the fashion industry, which absorbed Vogue more thoroughly than any other audience. The song became the unofficial anthem of fashion advertising. It was used in the 2003 Sex and the City finale. It was used in countless commercials. It was used at fashion week openings. It was used by drag clubs to introduce queens. And in 2006, it was used in the most iconic montage in the entire fashion film canon.
The Devil Wears Prada came out in June of 2006. The film, based on Lauren Weisberger’s novel, starred Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly, the ice-cold editor of a Vogue-coded magazine called Runway. Anne Hathaway played Andy Sachs, the assistant who learns to play the game. The film made $326 million on a $41 million budget. It defined the office-comedy genre for a generation. It is, twenty years later, one of Disney’s most-streamed catalog titles.
And in the middle of the film, there is a montage — Andy walking through the streets of New York and Paris in escalating outfits, her transformation from a sweater-wearing journalism graduate into a fashion-industry insider. The song under that montage is Vogue. It is the moment Andy becomes the kind of person Miranda would respect.
It was a brilliant choice. Because the song already had a 16-year head start as the unofficial sound of fashion. By 2006, you didn’t even have to introduce it. The audience knew. The piano hit and your brain did the rest.
Now fast forward 19 more years. November 12, 2025. 20th Century Studios drops the first teaser for The Devil Wears Prada 2. The trailer is 50 seconds long. Meryl Streep walks back into Runway’s offices. Anne Hathaway gets in the elevator. Miranda gives her a look and says, “Took you long enough.”
The song under the trailer? Vogue. Same song. 35 years later.
The teaser became the most-viewed comedy trailer in 15 years — 181.5 million views in its first 24 hours. The full trailer dropped during the 2026 Grammy Awards on February 1st. Same song. Same elegant strings. Same beat. The full trailer hit 222 million views in its first 24 hours — the most-viewed trailer in 20th Century Studios’ history.
The film comes out May 1, 2026. As of this recording, that is three days from now. And Vogue is, once again, the song that is selling fashion to the world.
MIDSCRIPT HOOK — CLIP CANDIDATE: A 1990 single is selling tickets to a 2026 movie. Same song. Same beat. Same swagger. The fashion industry tried to replace Vogue with new songs for 35 years. They never could. So they just kept using the original. That is what cultural durability looks like.
So let’s come back to the question that has followed this song from the beginning. Was Madonna an ambassador or an extractor?
I have spent a long time on this question. I think the honest answer is: she was both, and the truth is uncomfortable. Madonna gave voguing a level of visibility no documentary, no club night, no underground network was ever going to deliver. She brought Jose and Luis Xtravaganza onto a world tour and into a world-famous documentary. She refused to denounce queer culture during the AIDS crisis when most pop stars were silent. She used her power to push HIV-positive dancers, gay men, and ballroom culture into mainstream view at a time when politicians wouldn’t say the word AIDS. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, a lot.
And. The community she lifted was not paid in proportion to what they created. Six million copies sold. Number one in 30 countries. The dancers got a tour salary and went home. The Houses got name recognition without infrastructure. The Black trans women who had founded the entire scene — Crystal LaBeija, Pepper LaBeija, the figures Paris Is Burning made famous — mostly died in poverty.
Jose Xtravaganza, when asked about cultural appropriation in 2018, gave one of the cleanest answers in this entire conversation. He said: “I’m very territorial about vogue culture. I teach it all over the world. I always inform my students of the culture, not just the movement. LGBTQ people of color have created a culture that took in people who were thrown out onto the street by straight people. We loved, nurtured and supported them. What you see in vogueing is real pride, beauty and elegance, created out of struggle and hardship. People should know and acknowledge it.”
That is the legacy. That is the work that has continued past Madonna, past the song, past the moment. The Houses are still here. The balls are still happening. There are voguing schools in 50 countries. The category at the Met Gala in 2024 had Anna Wintour judging alongside Jose Xtravaganza. That is a sentence that would have been impossible in 1989.
ACT 3 CLOSING HOOK — CLIP CANDIDATE: In 1990, voguing was an underground gay Black and Latino dance form most of America had never heard of. Today, it has Anna Wintour judging it at the Met Gala. The journey took 34 years. The song that started it is still on the radio. And the only people who can tell you whether the trade was worth it are the people who built the dance — most of whom didn’t live long enough to see it.
4. Outro
Format: Cultural commentator voice. Designed to be clipped on its own as a stand-alone reflection. The closing lines are the standard Uncovering the Cover sign-off.
[Soft music returns. Slower than the cold open. Reflective.]
So that is the story of Vogue. A song that was supposed to be a B-side, recorded in a closet for $5,000, became the highest-selling single of 1990. It was inspired by a dance form invented by Black and Latino queer kids in Harlem who had been thrown out of their homes. Madonna walked into a New York club, watched two members of the House of Xtravaganza dance, and decided to put the entire scene on MTV. The song hit number one in over 30 countries. The video, directed by an unknown 27-year-old named David Fincher, became one of the greatest music videos ever made. The Marie Antoinette VMA performance burned itself into pop culture memory. And then — a year after the song was released — a documentary called Paris Is Burning came out and showed the world the actual community Madonna had been borrowing from.
Here is what I think the song really teaches us. Pop music does not exist in a vacuum. The biggest hits in history are almost never invented from nothing. They are usually a translation — a piece of underground culture, a marginalized art form, a sound from a community most of the world has never been forced to look at, brought up to the mainstream by an artist with the resources to amplify it. Sometimes that translation is generous. Sometimes it is extractive. Most of the time, the truth is messier than either.
Vogue is the cleanest case study we have. The song is brilliant. The video is iconic. The performance is unforgettable. The dancers were credited on the album. The tour gave them a salary. Madonna spoke openly about queer culture during the AIDS crisis when most of pop music was silent. And. The community that built the dance did not become wealthy. The houses did not get a percentage. The trans Black women who started the entire scene mostly died poor. Voguing went global. The voguers themselves did not.
Thirty-five years later, Vogue is still the song the fashion industry reaches for. It opened The Devil Wears Prada in 2006. It is opening The Devil Wears Prada 2 right now. It is the song that has outlived its critics, its lawsuits, its scandals, and most of the people who first danced to it. It is, in many ways, the most stubborn pop song of the last 40 years. And it is doing the same thing it has always done — selling fashion to America, in a language that was invented by people America once refused to look at.
That is the cover story. The song covered a culture. The culture survived the song. And the conversation about what was owed, what was paid, and what was lost — that is still happening on dance floors, in classrooms, on Pose, in Renaissance, on the runway of every fashion show that opens with a vogueing model. The story of Vogue is not over. It is just on a longer loop than most of us realize.
[Music swells. Brief pause.]
[Standard Closing]
“This has been Uncovering the Cover, Vogue: How Madonna Turned Harlem’s Underground Into the Sound of The Devil Wears Prada. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend who also enjoys music culture, because our culture is best preserved when music is shared. Subscribe, follow us and review us, so we can reach more music culture fans. Follow us on Instagram and TikTok, and let us know which song you’d like uncovered next. You can go to our website, which is linked in the show notes to find a transcript and all the information regarding this episode. Uncovering the Cover brings you the hidden stories behind music’s greatest transformations. Until next time!”