Ed Sheeran's Flop Sweat, Royal Drama and Remembering Bob Mackie

Tom & Lorenzo’s Pop Style Opinionfest

Tom and Lorenzo dive into three cultural topics: the fallout from Ed Sheeran's tour controversy involving Macklemore's firing, ongoing royal

Key takeaways

• The Ed Sheeran-Macklemore situation highlights how political stances are increasingly scrutinized in celebrity culture.
• Royal family controversies continue to dominate public discourse despite their performative nature.

Main topics

• Ed Sheeran tour controversy
• Macklemore firing and public backlash

Notable quotes

"When someone of that age dies and is that accomplished, it's... more important to talk about them triumphantly."

Conclusion

The hosts reflect on how celebrity culture is increasingly entangled w

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:22) I'm Lorenzo. Speaker 2 (0:23) And this is the PopStyle Opinion Fest. Hello, kittens. Welcome back to another edition of the PSO. I'm the T in your T-Lo, Tom Fitzgerald. And I'm here with the low in your T-Lo, Lorenzo Marquez, my lovely husband. Hello. Speaker 1 (0:34) How Speaker 2 (0:34) are you, lovely husband? I'm still cranky with my finger. Cranky as hell. Lorenzo's hand surgery has been harder on him than we realized. Speaker 1 (0:43) I Speaker 2 (0:43) know. Speaker 1 (0:43) I thought it was going to be in and out, easy, quick, you know. But now, I mean, I guess when it comes to your hand or whatever. Well, Speaker 2 (0:51) and you work at a desk all day. Right, right. Anyway, Speaker 1 (0:54) the recovery process is taking longer than I expected. And I'm getting very annoyed with it. God, you wouldn't believe you guys. Which is great because we're going to give him Speaker 2 (1:05) a topic today that he just loves to yell about. Oh, please, come on. We have a bunch of things we're going to talk about. Little goofy things of very... of almost no import, but that's our specialty. That's what we specialize in discussing. Want to talk about the blow up with Ed Sheeran's concert tour and Macklemore being basically fired from it and then everything, the blow back from that. We want to talk a little bit about that. What else we want to talk Speaker 1 (1:39) about? Oh, we want to talk about, there's royal drama. There's always royal drama. Speaker 2 (1:45) But I said to Lorenzo when we were batting around topics, I was like, you know what, those assholes are all being assholes this week, so why don't we talk about them for a little bit. So yes, a little bit of royal drama. And finally, a topic near and dear to our hearts. A salute to Mr. Bob Mackie, who died last week or this past week. Everybody's dying. I know. All the legends are dying. All the Speaker 1 (2:13) great Speaker 2 (2:13) people, Speaker 1 (2:13) yeah. Speaker 2 (2:16) But an 87-year-old who was at a great life and has made amazing contributions to the world, when that person dies, I... And maybe this is cold-hearted of me, but I don't think of that as a tragedy. It's not a tragedy. It's actually a triumph. They lived 87 years. They changed the culture. They did amazing things. So when someone of that age dies and is that accomplished, it's... To me, I think it's more important to talk about them triumphantly, to talk about what they accomplished and why they were important. Speaker 2 (2:52) real quick before we, you know, you can go online, you can go to Wikipedia, you can find retrospectives on his work. We're just going to, you know, talk about the things that matter to us. But we met him very, very briefly. We never, ever. Oh Speaker 1 (3:08) my God, I forgot about it. Speaker 2 (3:09) Oh, I didn't. I've been thinking about that all week long because I remember thinking at the time, my God, he looks amazing. So this would have been, let's see, we... We met him at QVC and we went to QVC. Speaker 1 (3:21) I'm sure everybody knows what QVC is. Yeah, I Speaker 2 (3:24) don't think I need to explain that. Let me do some math here. We launched our blog in 2006 and we went to QVC with Project Runway Season 3 contestant, who was our friend at the time, Laura Bennett. she had a collection that was, she was unveiling on QVC. And she wanted us to come, you know, we were hanging out a lot back then. Because the studios are here. And Speaker 1 (3:51) we live in Philadelphia. Speaker 2 (3:51) Yes. Yeah. And the studios are outside of Philadelphia and in the suburbs. So, you know, we got to, it wasn't our only time there, right? We went to QVC with Emmett as well, right? Yes, we've Speaker 1 (4:04) been there a couple Speaker 2 (4:05) of times. A couple of times. So this was when a Lars collection, you know, they were letting, Project Runway contestants have collections on QVC back then. And this, so this would have been about 2007, Speaker 1 (4:17) 2008, Speaker 2 (4:18) early 2008. So I'm just trying to, you know, get a time in here. And if he was like 80s, so he would have been about 70 when we saw him. Anyway, the QVC complex is enormous. Speaker 1 (4:32) It's giant. It is ridiculous. It is overwhelming. It's like this. cathedral to capitalism and Speaker 2 (4:38) we were wandering around open mount and literally just ran into him he was he was going to be on the air in fact i think he was on his way to the set Speaker 1 (4:46) yeah it's probably before her and um uh laura bennett yeah Speaker 2 (4:50) he gave us a big hello because we said hello because i was like Speaker 1 (4:53) oh my god that's bob mackie and Speaker 2 (4:54) he gave us a big hello and it was just if you've seen any pictures i mean he had a beautiful smile just he was a friendly guy yeah lovely lovely man but And that's our one and only encounter with the great Bob Mackie. But anybody who knows anything about fashion design in the last 50 years or costume design, 50, more like 70, costume design, they know that he is a major name in our cultural understanding of female entertainers. I think he actually... Speaker 2 (5:35) changed what female entertainers look like. You know, prior to his collaborations with Cher and Tina Turner and Ann-Margaret and Carol Burnett. Speaker 2 (5:49) If you were talking about a singer coming out to perform on a stage, a female singer, she would be in a dress. She would probably be, depending on the type of music that she was promoting, it would either be a gown or it would be some sort of party dress. Something that, you know, you would, a female consumer or a dress-wearing consumer would be able to go out and buy. had an aspirational quality to it. And we still have female pop singers who dress that way, who present themselves that way, who dress in party clothes, in girl clothes. But what he did was that he turned performers like Cher and Tina Turner into almost like superheroes. Right. Where he was combining... He wasn't he never wanted to put them out in basic dresses. He wanted to put them out in these eye-popping costumes that actually no one would wear in real life because they weren't particularly practical. Speaker 1 (6:50) Especially because most of the time it was for television and you see that same person pretty much every day or a couple of times a week. So you needed to bring something new every time. It would be a wow every time that person was on TV the next day or whenever. And he did that. He was able to do that really, really well. And, you know, he's been designing for, I mean, he was designing. Forever. Yeah, he Speaker 2 (7:15) designed, I mean, just as a, do you mind? No, go ahead. Just as a, to go all the way back, he helped design the, he wasn't the sole designer, but he helped design the Happy Birthday, Mr. President dress that Marilyn Monroe wore. Right, right. And he was very young, but when he did this, and I mean, that just gives you. Speaker 2 (7:36) Look at it this way. Okay, so you have that dress, and then you have, for instance, the Tina Turner flame dress, which she, I mean, I don't even think I need to describe it. Speaker 1 (7:47) It Speaker 2 (7:47) was an iconic look, and she wasn't the only artist that wore it. I think Ann-Margaret wore it. I think Raquel Welch wore it. It was a dress that just hung off the body, exposed most of the legs, and it was all sequins, and it looked like flames. And then you think of that, and then you think of, say, the... Calabernet Scarlett O'Hara dress. Yes, Speaker 1 (8:08) insane. Speaker 2 (8:09) Those are three utterly iconic looks. Like, just the very definition of iconic. The happy birthday Mr. President dress and the Scarlett O'Hara curtain rod gown. Um, those were like literally culture-shifting moments. Those are garments that people who don't know anything about fashion or costume designer, they know those garments. And I said this the other day when he died on Blue Sky, because someone tweeted a picture of the scarlet hair dress. And I did. I said at the time, 20 years of writing about fashion has taught me that. Speaker 2 (8:49) This is the most cited and referred to dress by the general public, by people who don't really follow fashion or anything. That's the dress. And every time someone made a joking reference in our comments, well, not every time, but... Let me put it this way. There came a time where we actually had to ask people to stop referring to that dress in our comment section because they were bringing it up all the time. Every single dress was compared to that dress, regardless of whether it looked like it or not. And it really taught me, like, that's people's understanding of that's a design. If you say what's a, you know, a fashion design, a costume design, that's their understanding of it. Because Speaker 1 (9:30) first of all, it was smart. thing to do. Speaker 2 (9:33) Hilarious. Speaker 1 (9:33) Hilarious joke. Yeah. When she says that Speaker 2 (9:35) he Speaker 1 (9:35) came up with Speaker 2 (9:36) it on his own. Oh, he did? Yeah. Yeah. The writers did not come up with that. He was the one that said we should leave the curtain rod in. That's genius. That's genius. I mean, Speaker 1 (9:44) it's referencing an iconic movie. Yeah. It's, you know, it's, it's. an amazing person yeah um and the moment she steps out Speaker 2 (9:53) in that and and comes down the steps and that i mean that's hilarious television history the laughter that i mean it almost shut the sketch down and think about that it it's a costume right and you had some of the funniest performers doing their work in that scene and it's actually a really funny sketch And yet everyone remembers the costume, not the performers, not the lines, not the jokes. It's the costume. And that's... Who can you say that about? How many people can you say that about? That they created things that just transcend people's memories and understanding. And I just want to go back to the pop star thing real quick. When you think of, like, Beyoncé or Sabrina Carpenter or... to a certain extent, Taylor's... Well, actually, yeah, Taylor Swift. And you think about how they dress on stage now. They're wearing, like, showgirl costumes and superhero costumes and bodysuits. They're not coming out in dresses. Or not standard dresses. And that is the point I want to make, is that he altered how we look at female stage performers and how they... dress. They don't dress conventionally anymore. They dress very unconventionally on stage. They dress in these statement pieces, these character based, they're selling, you know, it's not about them coming out pretty. It's about them selling a persona. Right. Speaker 1 (11:17) It's having a great understanding of what the situation is, what the venue is, you know. And how to dazzle an audience. Yes, because we're talking most of the time about, you know, incredibly big Venues. Venues, stages. I mean, and then you need to make sure that you can see the person. Right. You can see what the person's wearing. So, yeah, I mean, you take all that into consideration. The fact that it's, you know, you're performing. Right. That's the word right there. You're performing. So you have to come up with something that goes with that. And he always understood that. Speaker 2 (11:50) Yeah. Unlike, say, another genius of his generation, Halston. Yes. Okay. Unlike Halston. Speaker 2 (11:59) who understood, who had this like genius level understanding of how to drape fabric on a body. Speaker 2 (12:09) Bob Mackie has this genius level understanding of how to construct something for the body. Not that Halston didn't have construction genius. I mean, it actually did take a certain amount of genius to do the kind of designs that he did. But my thing with Mackie is that he was so good at creating these garments that made you think the person was naked, made you... that you were about to see something you weren't supposed to see, but they were so perfectly constructed. The Marilyn dress is like that. It is an illusion that you'd think you're seeing her body underneath it, but you're not. It's the way the dress was constructed, it's the way it was beaded, it's