As Lorde sang, feet rooted to the spot, hands clawing at that rarefied Grammy Awards air, her fingertips looked a smudged mess of black. It was an anti-fashion statement enough to cause its own online stir.
Or - and yes, this is a stretch - might it have been its
own little comment. Something about being an outsider to the US of A? Because if you've spent much of the 17th year of your life undergoing the joys of US immigration formalities, as you've crossed the Pacific again and again, you've been fingerprinted more than most.
Or could it have been something about getting one's artistic, idealistic hands dirty in what is the American, most mainstream, often most baffling, biggest televised music event on the planet?
Whatever it was, it wasn't about to compete in attention-getting efforts with Katy Perry (trying to out-Goth Lorde in one of Madonna's old Pope-scaring get-ups) or Pink (auditioning for her own Cirque du Soleil show again).
But try as they might with their vast teams of co-writers, the showgirls of US pop couldn't stop Lorde from becoming the Woman of the Night.
