Miley in Underwear, Post-Everything

By September 2013, Miley Cyrus had already done the VMAs, the foam finger, the wrecking ball, the systematic dismantling of everything Disney had built around her. The underwear-as-rebellion phase was just another frame in the sequence—provocative by design, obviously calculated, and somehow still effective at making people argue about it for days. Whether she was controlling the narrative or the narrative had swallowed her whole, I couldn’t tell then and I still can’t.