The people’s princess CMAT went to the BRITS and served up a fashion moment that will live on in the collective consciousness for generations. So what’s the craic with the backlash?
Quickly becoming Dunboyne’s proudest export when she burst onto the scene in 2020 with her debut single, ‘Another Day (KFC)’, followed by the new national anthem ‘I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby’, CMAT topped Irish charts with If My Wife Knew I’d Be Dead in 2022, and again late last year with her sophomore album, Crazymad, for Me.
Fusing country and pop with equal measures of sincerity and silliness, her offbeat lyricism, powerful live shows, and tongue-in-cheek sense of humour made us, the Irish people, go Crazymad, for her. So, you can imagine the scenes when she was nominated for a BRIT award in the same category as Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and living legend Kylie Minogue.
Though she didn’t take home the award for International Artist of the Year from the ceremony on Saturday 2 March—that honour went to SZA—her name has been on everyone’s lips for the past week all the same. And that, dear reader, is thanks to a little thing called the buttocks cleavage.
Yes, the buttocks cleavage. Clad in a Sophie Lincoln gown and styled to perfection by Mia Maxwell, CMAT’s all-black number had a high neckline, puffed sleeves, and a feather trim around the cut-out back that extended down, down, down to expose her derrière.
She gave us a hint of the heinie, if you will. A teensy bit of tushy, a peek of the posterior, a glimpse of the gluteus maximus. Essentially, it was an extremely elevated, chic builder’s crack. But it seems as though a certain facet of society wasn’t quite ready for a chic builder’s crack on the red carpet.
Speaking with Emma Barnett on BBC Woman’s Hour, the singer-songwriter shared a little more about the thought process behind the look. “I was actually very political about why I did it and why I wanted to do it. First of all, I thought it would be funny and fun, which is the most important thing ever.
But I had a lot of rules for the dress that were very specific, and one of them was that the amount of crack shown had to be corresponding to the average amount of cleavage line that you would show on the front, because I didn’t want anyone to accuse me of doing it in poor taste. It should be equal, because this bit is accepted and common, but this bit isn’t.”
dude with sign spotted outside itv hq pic.twitter.com/8S3p6E9gYy
— tiger b (@tiger_brooke) March 3, 2024
“I think that my derrière only caused a ruckus because it’s larger,” CMAT continued. “I’m a size 14 as opposed to a size 6, which I suppose is more commonly what we see on television, especially when it comes to musicians and pop stars.”
“In real life, people were loving it, but the internet is the internet and I had a lot of people that were very angry about the fact that I would do such a thing. They were horrified, and really aggressive in comments and messages, telling me that I had to go to the gym. The backlash was crazy.”
During the interview, CMAT mentions Alexander McQueen bumsters and the ubiquity of the ass cleavage back in the early ‘00s, but the trend never really went away. Remember Rihanna’s sheer diamond encrusted gown at the 2014 CFDA fashion awards?
Exposed g-strings, or whale tails, have become a fashion accessory, sewn into dresses for maximum impact. Zoë Kravitz at the 2022 Vanity Fair Oscars party, the SKIMS keyhole dress, and the rise of ‘naked dressing’, having a peek of the cheek has become pretty much par for the course on the red carpet. In fact, just days later, Katy Perry wore a skirt-corset hybrid to a Billboard Women in Music event, exposing the whole damn g-string.
So what was so offensive about this? Why did the Daily Mail feel the need to censor and pixelate that crescent of bottom?
— han ? (@spanners2all) March 3, 2024
Was it just as CMAT says herself, that her size 14 frame—which is, if anything, below the women’s dress size national average—caused the dress to jar with some? Was it because the dress wasn’t engineered to appeal to the male gaze? Did its camp edge throw some off? Was it because she took up space, beamed with energy and self-confidence, rather than stand demurely to one side?
CMAT may have mooned us, but it was a total eclipse of the heart.
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