Marcel Winatschek

The Underwear Years

Miley Cyrus spent the better part of a couple of years proving she wasn’t the Disney kid, and a lot of that proof came down to underwear and provocation. The deliberate shock value was loud, but it was masking something simpler—someone suffocating in a role and needing to blow it up to escape.

I remember it reading as necessary at the time, though you could see the desperation underneath it all. The shock wore off eventually, but that clarity didn’t—the understanding that sometimes you have to burn something completely to become something new. By the time people stopped being scandalized, she’d already moved on to whoever came next.