Madonna and child? It’s a recipe for business disaster

The singer Madonna is launching a fashion line with her teenage daughter. It’ll end in tears, says 15-year-old Olivia McAuley. Lourdes, don’t do it. Do you really, really want this? Just think about what the reality of working so closely with your mother might be.

I am talking about this week’s announcement that Madonna and her 13-year-old daughter are collaborating on a junior fashion line for Macy’s, the US department store chain. It’s not that it comes as a surprise to me. After all, the general consensus among celebrities is to stay young and be “down with the kids”, and they are relying on their adolescent daughters to do just this. It’s an omnipresent trend.

I see it at my tutorial college in South Kensington, where I will soon be studying for my AS levels. The 20-40 mums are everywhere: 20 from the back, 40 from the front. They are skinnier than us, wear tighter jeans than us, higher shoes, have clearer skin; they outdo us in every sense. It’s as if all the advantages we have because we are young, they have too.

As for the collaboration, I think the idea is brave – brave but idiotic, particularly on Madonna’s part, and I wonder if she is doing it in order to have some common ground with her daughter. We all do things with our mums that bring us together. My mum and I have recently done up the attic, we’ve planned weekend holidays to Norfolk. They are nice projects for us to work on together. Maybe creating a fashion line with her daughter is Madonna’s equivalent. But, in my view, it’s bound to backfire.

Firstly, with a business partner or a colleague, compromise, flexibility, grace and a good balance of personalities are simply part of the deal. I do not recall that any of these characteristics are particularly prominent in a mother-daughter relationship. In fact, judging by my experience, the relationship is actually about unrelenting stubborness, with short bursts of love and huge dips of disdain on both sides.

Not only this, but all teenagers are notoriously difficult. We all push the boundaries if the rules don’t suit us. One of the things about being the daughter of a mother is that we know what buttons to push to get a reaction, or to get what we want. Not great, but I guess it’s a part of growing up – and, hopefully, we all grow out of it.

But not Madonna, the eternal teenager and an iconic diva. There is bound to be an explosion. I picture them in their studio together, doing their sketches, talking through ideas. But what if Lourdes disagrees with her Peter Pan mum who is used to getting her own way? Just as in every day life, daughters take out their frustrations on their mother. Lourdes will be no different. She does it, we all do it, because we know that if we were in a particularly dire mood that day and screamed “I hate you, you ruin my life !” at our friends, they would think we were lunatics, and would slowly disassociate themselves from us.

But a mother has to put up with it. She has no choice. Her undying love binds her to her daughter irrevocably. Therefore going into a business with your mother is a recipe for disaster: there are no boundaries to keep either of you in check. You have few inhibitions with your mother (in my case, none at all). That means that, in a business situation, you can say and do anything you like with the knowledge you will never get fired. That kind of power will completely cloud a young girl’s judgment. There is no need for a daughter to take constructive criticism from her mother: as far as she’s concerned, it’s unnecessary for her to listen to others ideas her experienced mother might have. Her fashion days are over.

Lourdes would feel her sense of what’s fashionable now is far more accurate than her mother’s; the young start the trends after all, they don’t copy them.