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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.
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.”
“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.”
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.
