Viewers of the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday night didn’t get to see all of Måneskin’s performance of “Supermodel” thanks to the quick work of network censors.
Bassist Victoria De Angelis started with her left breast exposed (the nipple was covered with a pastie), as it was earlier on the VMAs red carpet. But as the high-energy performance went on, her top came down. (De Angelis is known to occasionally perform topless at Måneskin concerts.)
Whenever the bare-chested musician appeared on camera, MTV quickly replaced the video feed with a looping wide shot of the arena recorded before the show. Roughly 35 seconds of the 2m40s performance was not shown.
On social media, fans initially speculated that MTV censors objected to singer Damiano David’s g-string – which would have been a double standard considering the plethora of female buttocks on display earlier in the show.
Some fans didn’t realize the cuts to the looping clip was the work of a censor.
Others suggested viewers could have handled the sight of breasts. One person fumed: “Let’s make nipples free to be seen! a man with a shirtless and buttocks out is fine, the woman's breasts are censored! s**tty misogynists!”
Another tweeted: “I’m still mad as hell over vmas ruining maneskin's performance, a shirtless man is fine but when it's a woman suddenly it's a problem and has to be censored? Get out of here with this bull…”
Watch the VMAs performance below: