From a commercial standpoint, Miley Cyrus’s 2025 album Something Beautiful feels like a moment of pause following the sweeping success of its predecessor, Endless Summer Vacation. For instance, the standout hit “Flowers” from Endless Summer Vacation reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 1 on the Global 200 in Billboard’s 2023 year-end chart, and earned Cyrus her first-ever Grammy Award, including the coveted Record of the Year. By contrast, Something Beautiful debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200 with 44,000 units in its opening week, only to drop quickly thereafter, showing little staying power.

However, as her pre-release interview with Apple Music reveals, Something Beautiful had a very different starting point. Miley Cyrus explained: “I never wrote a song thinking I want to get a Grammy, but receiving that Grammy for ‘Flowers’ was like—it felt more like a band-aid on a broken heart in some way. (…) After I felt that healing, that validation that somewhere inside of me needed to feel, I really felt free to make the album that I’ve been craving my whole adult career to create.” She added: “The album was experimental, but I never wanted to abandon pop music.” Zane Lowe, the interviewer, expanded on this point: “Pop is culture. It’s not just music. It’s fashion and it’s film and it’s visual. You absorb everything in your own way. You look at it as true art and you will stand by the art.” This exchange neatly encapsulates where Something Beautiful begins and what it seeks to achieve.

Let’s return to November of last year, when Miley Cyrus first unveiled Something Beautiful in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar. At the time, she described the project as a visual album inspired by Pink Floyd’s 1979 rock opera The Wall. Yet, as Zane Lowe suggested, she would have to filter such a sacred touchstone of rock history through her own perspective. Cyrus explained: “My idea was making The Wall, but with a better wardrobe and more glamorous and filled with pop culture.” She went on to say: “The visual component of this is driving the sound. The songs, whether they’re about destruction or heartbreak or death, they’re presented in a way that is beautiful, because the nastiest times of our life do have a point of beauty. You can’t have a painting without highlights and contrast.”

Following that intent, it feels only natural that Something Beautiful would be paired with a film. In her Apple Music interview, Miley Cyrus described the visual album as her own way of touring. That decision also reflects some very real considerations. Cyrus suffers from Reinke’s edema, a condition that causes fluid to build up in the vocal cords, making it difficult for her to sustain long tours. At the same time, she has grown weary of the traditional touring format and has been seeking new ways to connect more deeply with her audience. In fact, her last large-scale tour dates back to 2014, in support of Bangerz. As a result, the film Something Beautiful is not merely a promotional add-on but the central medium of the entire project. It premiered on June 6, 2025, at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, followed by a one-day theatrical release in North America on June 12.

Now it’s time to talk about fashion. When Miley Cyrus spoke of creating “a rock opera with a better wardrobe,” she wasn’t being metaphorical. Global tours demand massive investments in staging, choreography, and costumes. Instead, Cyrus channeled that same energy and resources into film production. Within this medium, fashion is not just a stage costume glimpsed from dozens of meters away, but the most important spectacle captured in high resolution—the very framework that structures the visuals. Carefully selected high-fashion archives from the late 20th century, alongside custom-made pieces, stand in for traditional storytelling.

Among them, Miley Cyrus’s choice is distinctly Mugler from the 1990s. Founded in 1974 by designer Thierry Mugler as an haute couture house, Mugler has recently dressed some of the world’s biggest artists—including BLACKPINK for their Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival performance in 2023, as well as Beyoncé, Dua Lipa, and Cardi B. Yet Mugler’s most legendary work remains the extravagant garments and theatrical runway presentations of its 1990s couture shows.

Take, for example, the costume featured in the album cover and the opening track “Prelude.” Both draw from Thierry Mugler’s 1997 collection. That year, Mugler explored themes of “Les Insectes” and “Les Chimères,” transforming his models into fantastical hybrid beings—part human, part insect, part bird. From the inhuman and the grotesque, he unearthed a beauty that was both sublime and perilous. Miley Cyrus directly connects the pioneering vision of that collection to the themes she seeks to explore. “Prelude,” as its title suggests, functions as an overture: not a song but a spoken piece, sonically reminiscent of an avant-garde sci-fi film soundtrack. Visually, the bold aesthetics of high fashion resonate in tandem. It is a declaration that both the album and its accompanying film step beyond the conventional structures of pop.

What about “More to Lose,” which departs from the same design to stage a stark contrast in black and white? Here, Miley Cyrus appears in a dark, striking suit complete with a veil that obscures her face. The look originates from Mugler’s 1998 Lingerie Revisited collection, widely known through Helmut Newton’s catalog photographs. This outfit fuses the eroticism implied by the collection’s theme with a severe elegance that verges on the funereal. The veil, in particular, powerfully asserts the isolating nature of heartbreak as a personal agony.

Moving on to “Easy Lover,” we encounter traces of another iconic collection: Mugler’s 1992 Les Cowboys. This collection brought elements of the American West—cowboy and biker culture—into the realm of high fashion. Having shed the suit from “More to Lose” and completed her transformation, Miley Cyrus takes the stage in turquoise chaps, the protective leather coverings cowboys wear over their pants. The backup dancers, dressed in looks reminiscent of Mugler’s 1997 insect collection, reinforce the sense that we are witnessing a coherent world-building across the performances. The song also forges another link to reality: it was once considered for Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter. Beyoncé herself is a longtime admirer of the same 1992 collection. During the Cowboy Carter era, and even earlier in her I Am… Sasha Fierce days, she famously wore Mugler’s Harley-Davidson bustier, one of the collection’s most iconic pieces.

Mugler may form the backbone, but he is hardly the only designer in play. Consider Alexander McQueen: in “Walk of Fame,” Miley Cyrus wanders the boulevard clad in a distressed, asymmetrical dress. McQueen’s signature fusion of dark imagination and romantic beauty—still central to the brand’s identity today—makes her choice all the more fitting. By singing of both the glamour and the emptiness of stardom in such a piece, Cyrus needs no further explanation. Azzedine Alaïa’s leather hood evokes the fierce, commanding persona embodied by his iconic muse, Grace Jones. Meanwhile, in “More to Lose,” the opulent spectacle of Hollywood is threaded through with Bob Mackie’s legacy—designs once worn by divas such as Cher and Diana Ross—adding yet another layer of context.

Miley Cyrus has neither boarded the visual-album trend belatedly nor replicated it in the same way as others. Nor is Something Beautiful merely a showcase of fine costumes with an emphasis on fashion. At a time when even music videos are often reduced to background playback, this project proposes a fully sensorial experience that fuses sight and sound. To achieve this, Cyrus drew deliberately and precisely from designers of the 1990s and early 2000s who embraced theatrical imagery. Instead of a tour, she has created images meant to endure. And in doing so—casting off the lingering gaze of a wayward Disney child star, gaining full recognition and a sense of freedom—we meet a pop artist whose language sets her apart from anyone else of her generation. Something Beautiful is now available to stream on Disney+.