By Giulia Piceni. Miley Cyrus x Maison Margiela A/I 2025, Ph. Courtesy of Maison Margiela – Paolo Roversi.
Why the Margiela x Miley Cyrus Campaign is Dividing the Fashion World
The announcement of Maison Margiela’s Autumn-Winter 2025 campaign has provoked a flurry of debate across the fashion industry. For the first time in its history, the house has appointed a celebrity ambassador: Miley Cyrus. The decision, made under the creative direction of Glenn Martens and the commercial oversight of Renzo Rosso, brings Margiela into the orbit of mainstream celebrity culture, making a stark departure from its established ethos. For decades, Margiela has embodied conceptual rigour, anonymity, and the refusal of spectacle for its own sake. Martin Margiela famously avoided interviews and photographs, rejecting the cult of personality in favour of a faceless, collective identity. The clothes were never about the designer, and certainly never about the celebrity. Against this backdrop, the decision to centre Miley Cyrus in Margiela’s first global campaign feels less like innovation and more like capitulation in the name of commercial gain. The following five points outline why this collaboration risks undermining the Maison’s philosophical foundations, aesthetic coherence, and cultural positioning.
1. What Margiela Loses With Miley: Its Faceless Identity
Margiela’s genius has always lain in the erasure of the individual in service of the collective imagination. The anonymity of white coats, the blank invitations, and the house’s resistance to star-driven narratives allowed wearers to project themselves onto the clothing without interference.
By appointing Miley Cyrus, Margiela replaces this blank canvas with a figure whose cultural associations are impossible to ignore. Cyrus carries with her a history that ranges from Disney stardom to controversial pop reinventions, all of which inevitably colour the perception of the campaign. Instead of liberating interpretation, the brand now presents a preloaded narrative that risks constraining it. The power of Margiela’s faceless identity, a silent rebellion against fashion’s obsession with fame, is traded for the recognisability of a global star.
2. From Subcultures to Pop Fame: Why Margiela and Miley Clash
Margiela has always spoken to audiences attuned to the avant-garde: experimental musicians, underground clubs, and subcultural references that resist the mainstream. The house’s codes resonate with those who listen to industrial noise, attend Berlin’s techno nights, or immerse themselves in performance art rather than pop concerts.
Miley Cyrus, despite her chameleonic career, is not rooted in this cultural vocabulary. Her trajectory, from Hannah Montana to arena tours, from glittering glam rock reinventions to Hollywood glamour, represents the mainstream’s appetite for reinvention rather than the subterranean experimentation that nourished Margiela. To align the Maison with her persona risks a flattening of nuance. It suggests a pivot towards accessibility at the expense of the intellectual niche that has always been Margiela’s strength.
3. Glossy Photos Diluted Margiela’s Fragile Beauty
The imagery of the campaign, shot by Paolo Roversi, adds another layer of dissonance. Roversi’s oeuvre is celebrated for its softness, intimacy, and embrace of imperfection, qualities that resonate with Margiela’s sensitivity to fragility and temporality. Yet in this campaign, his lens appears uncharacteristically polished, the result resembling a glossy advertisement rather than a meditation on impermanence. The photographs, while technically accomplished, feel controlled, sanitised, and commercially safe. Gone is the sense of fleeting vitality, the poetic melancholy that defines both Roversi’s photography and Margiela’s imagery. Instead, the campaign delivers a visual message more aligned with luxury branding than with conceptual storytelling, further distancing the house from its roots.
4. Misusing Bianchetto: Symbolism or Surface-Level Shock?
Few techniques are as emblematic of Margiela as bianchetto — the whitewashing method used to make impermanence emerge through the signs of the constant flux of time. Historically, its application suggested that fashion, like paint, could crack, peel, and transform, embracing process over permanence. In this campaign, bianchetto is applied directly onto Miley Cyrus’s body, a gesture loaded with symbolism yet executed with questionable logic. Cyrus, a figure who has carefully managed her image through constant reinvention, hardly embodies impermanence in the Margiela sense. Her celebrity status thrives on permanence, the persistence of recognition, the durability of fame. Moreover, the visual nod to Annie Leibovitz’s controversial 2005 portrait of a young Cyrus feels opportunistic, more provocation than reflection. Rather than extending Margiela’s conceptual vocabulary, the gesture risks reading as hollow symbolism, a surface-level citation detached from the depth the Maison once demanded.
5. When Commercial Goals Clash with Conceptual Integrity
Finally, the campaign reflects a broader shift within Margiela’s corporate strategy under Renzo Rosso’s OTB Group. Visibility, scale, and profitability appear to have become the guiding imperatives. Yet, Margiela, already one of the most coveted houses in luxury fashion, does not need a celebrity ambassador to maintain relevance. Its legacy and influence are secure without resorting to star power. By inserting Miley Cyrus, a performer whose values, audience, and aesthetic do not organically intersect with Margiela, the house risks diluting its intellectual clarity. This collaboration signals a prioritisation of mass attention over conceptual purity, raising the question of what is gained by courting the mainstream when Margiela’s strength has always been its refusal of it.
