Sabrina Carpenter’s Madonna homage journey has been quite storied within the last several months. Starting at the 2024 VMAs, when Carpenter showed up to the ceremony in a sample gown version of Madonna’s famed Bob Mackie dress from the 1991 Oscars, her “appreciation” for the blueprint of all modern pop stars continued during her performance that night. Which featured a very blatant nod to the kiss between Madonna and Britney at the 2003 VMAs. As if that wasn’t enough, Carpenter kept revealing her love for the very specific “1991 era” of Madonna by recreating her Marilyn-ified look from the Vogue Italia cover that year for her own “regular” Vogue cover for the March 2025 issue.
But one supposes her first truly glaring “valentine” to M was in 2022, when she performed a cover of “Like A Virgin” during select dates of her Emails I Can’t Send Tour. And it is that song/associated performance visual that, er, comes to mind most when taking in Sabrina Carpenter’s “eyebrow-raising” rendition of “Bed Chem” at the 2025 BRIT Awards. Though, yes, “Espresso” was performed as well, it was “Bed Chem” that left many a spectator both “gagged” and scandalized. To the latter point, it was that moment with the Queen’s Guard (because, no, it will never be the “King’s Guard”) and Charli XCX’s see-through dress that managed to garner hundreds of complaints from certain pearl-clutching viewers. Something that Madonna is very familiar with/practically invented in her own role as Controversy Queen.
Indeed, it was Madonna’s performance of “Like A Virgin” at the 1984 VMAs that defined the scope of modern moral outrage, with M not only “daring” to gyrate lasciviously while posing as a “virginal” bride, but also displaying a totally ironic and tongue-in-cheek sense of humor about sexuality. Much the same way as Carpenter does/has made her own signature. And with this particular live rendition of “Bed Chem” on March 1, 2025, that much was solidified.
To be sure, Carpenter’s wink-wink sense of humor was already immediately apparent from the intro, when a slew of Royal Guards stomped, preened and danced to the tune of a “Rule, Britannia!” variation. Needless to say, this was a big “fuck you” to her Irish ex, Barry Keoghan, for there is nothing more insulting to an Irishman than such a patriotic display toward the Union Jack. Except, of course, a sexual display toward a Royal Guard. But, again, that now indelible moment doesn’t arrive until later, at the very end to be exact. However, “Bed Chem” starts around two minutes and seventeen seconds into the overall performance, when the opening notes to the John Ryan and Ian Kirkpatrick-produced track establish the “set change” onstage as the British flag of a “curtain” lifts to reveal a backdrop that looks decidedly ripped off from Christina Aguilera and co.’s “Lady Marmalade” video. Which wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility considering Carpenter has also expressed a love for Xtina, complete with a couple of live collaborations at this point, including Aguilera’s hits, “What A Girl Wants” and “Ain’t No Other Man.”
To heighten the Moulin Rouge stylings of the set design, Carpenter is accompanied by six “legs akimbo” dancers lying on their backs (decked out in skimpy lingerie, of course) on their own “mini beds” beneath her giant one featuring a heart-shaped headboard. When Carpenter emerges with her bedroom eyes (another “Barry, eat your heart out” moment), it doesn’t take her long to make some “subtle” thrusting motions with her crotch before the red babydoll dress she’s wearing comes off to reveal the rest of her rouge lingerie. And yes, lingerie worn as a standard of “stage wear” (and even day wear) has long been a staple of Madonna’s oeuvre, fully establishing the now timeless trend with 1990’s Blond Ambition Tour. And, although she had worn the cone bra corset before (with a version of it showing up as early as the “Open Your Heart” video in 1986), it was one new iteration of it in particular that became iconic in its own right thanks to being worn as Madonna gyrated and pantomimed masturbation while singing an “Indian-ified” (from a musical standpoint) take on “Like A Virgin.” This done, naturally, on a plush red bed—Madonna’s “hat tip” not only to the boudoir motif of a song about “virginality,” but also to her album cover for Like A Virgin, on which she appears in a wedding dress with a bouquet close at hand.
Wanting to totally obliterate the “virgin (but make it vampy)” image of that cover for this performance, Madonna opted to get even racier (“Dad, I’m not ‘getting’ racy, I’ve been racy”) than she did during her 1984 VMAs rendition. And, in contrast to Carpenter, Madonna doesn’t play it “precious” or “coy” when it comes to displaying her bedroom antics/prowess. Nor does she need an assist from a bevy of other women to get her sex-drenched message across. Because, although Madonna is “complemented” by her gay male backup dancers (sporting some cone bras themselves, for an added emphasis on M’s love of androgyny) for the majority of the performance, the spectacle is all ultimately about the notion of a woman’s self-pleasure—not 1) the pleasure she might be able to get from a man in the boudoir (which is usually quite rare) or 2) the pleasure she’s typically expected to give to him in the form of a blow J (as Carpenter puts on full display for her “big finish,” to use a sexual innuendo). In other words, Madonna espouses the idea that the best bed chem a girl can have is the one she has with herself a.k.a. the autoerotic kind.
So while Carpenter might have “shocked” and “appalled” some viewers who have yet to be fully desensitized by all that has already gone on long before Carpenter’s “sex show,” what should be more shocking and appalling is that, while Madonna remains an overt visual influence on pop stars like Carpenter, many of them have subverted her message to mean the exact opposite of her original subversion.
