Sometimes she’s the artist, sometimes she’s the canvas.
Miley Cyrus is making fashion history as the first face of Maison Margiela in four decades — and she’s doing it in nothing but body paint.
The “Flowers” singer stars in the French house’s Autumn/Winter 2025 Avant-Première campaign, shot by famed Italian photographer Paolo Roversi.
In several of the painterly portraits, Cyrus appears nude save for white brushstrokes, accessorized only with a handbag and cleft-toe Tabi boots.
“The nudes by Paolo are so iconic and signature to his art. Standing naked for a fashion campaign felt major,” the 32-year-old said in a release. “All I wore was body paint and the signature painted Tabi boots. In that moment, Margiela and I became one.”
The portraits reference the label’s iconic bianchetto technique, first introduced by founder Martin Margiela in 1989.
With bianchetto, layers of white paint are applied to furniture, garments, and now bodies, reducing each surface to a blank canvas and symbolically revealing the “trace of time.”
For longtime Cyrus fans, one image may look familiar. The over-the-shoulder pose echoes the infamous 2008 Vanity Fair photo shoot by Annie Leibovitz, in which a then-15-year-old Cyrus posed draped in nothing but a satin sheet.
The images caused a media firestorm at the time, forcing both the star and the magazine to apologize — though later, the singer changed her tune.
“IM NOT SORRY,” the singer posted on Twitter in 2018 alongside a photo of the New York Post cover from April 28, 2008. “F–k YOU #10yearsago”
Leibovitz defended the portrait to Time in 2008, saying it was the public that needed to catch up: “The Miley picture was a beautiful, strong, simple picture. I think it’s actually sort of innocent on some level. She loved taking that picture, and she was ready to take that picture. It’s just that her audience wasn’t ready.”
Nearly two decades later, Cyrus is again stripped back—now on her own terms.