Pink, Pigs, and Elton John

Miley Cyrus has been in the middle of a reinvention for most of her adult life, which is less surprising when you remember she spent her childhood as a Disney character. The Hannah Montana years were always going to produce either total compliance or total revolt, and she chose revolt—the twerking, the wrecking ball, the increasingly aggressive nudity, the persistent sense of someone running as fast as possible away from something.

Then came Younger Now and the whole register shifted. Quieter, more acoustic, almost ostentatiously unglamorous by comparison. It felt like a correction, or a rest. Then the #BitchIsBack hashtag started appearing, and the Wonderland cover dropped, shot by Ellen von Unwerth in pink—the German photographer who has spent thirty years making images of women that are simultaneously playful and charged, warm and deliberately constructed. Miley at 25 in that light looks exactly like someone who has been through several versions of herself and come out knowing which parts to keep.

The interview inside talks about her friendship with Elton John, which has been a genuine thing for years and which I find oddly moving—something about that pairing, the rhinestone veteran and the perpetually shifting pop star, suggests the mutual recognition is real. She talks about the pigs. Apparently there are pigs that roam her California house freely, which is the detail that makes her feel most like an actual person rather than a constructed celebrity persona.

Where she goes from here will say something about whether Younger Now was a genuine recalibration or just a phase between louder things. My instinct is that the pendulum swings back. But von Unwerth’s pink photographs suggest someone who knows exactly what she’s doing, which makes any prediction feel a bit presumptuous.