Oh Madonna, we so wish you didn’t show your bum at the Grammy’s. Yes, last year was the year of the booty, but that was last year! Leave the rear exposure to your friend Niki Minaj. Or the exhibitionist, Kim Kardashian West. Sure, you’ve done it all before. Still, it was heartbreaking to see that you needed some kind of a harness to hold everything up so as to be as pert as those girls. We know it’s not a wardrobe malfunction—that made it worse! While, admirably, a tease, for you, could be conceived with a mere flick of the back of a skirt rather than a swing on a burlesque pole, we would have preferred that your dress did the all the work. We like your Givenchy toreador-wear-as-body-suit, but we like your Super Bowl 2012 costume, the Givenchy Spartan-gear-as-disco-dress more. The Spanish bull-fighter costume aesthetic: you’ve flirted with that before. We remember the Take a Bow music video even when, in it, you were mostly clad in John Galliano. It was your screen lover, real-life matador Emilio Muñoz, who was dressed dazzlingly. Still, we love the old-world elegance you projected. You were at your sartorial best, pre-Evita. Yes, you should have let your dress do all the work as you had before. You were, after all, on a red carpet. And you are better than so many of them, such as Lady Gaga, who, inexplicably, was channelling Donatella Versace.

It is true that some people wish to age disgracefully, but we hope you are not one of them. As we write this, we’re listening to Nothing Fails. Maybe you’re right: “(you’ve) climbed the tree of life/And that’s why, no longer scared if (you) fall.” Or go bare-bottom.