Miley Cyrus on feminism, fashion and her MAC Viva Glam lipstick deal
WE ALL know that Miley Cyrus is full of opinion, but she certainly doesn’t hold back in this candid interview with Sunday Style’s Clare Press.
CELEBRITIES are people, too, you know.
Still, it is surreal to see this many in one room. A radiant Sharon Stone is in the house, chatting away to Justin Timberlake, who must have missed the black-tie memo (open-necked shirt, needs a shave). Eddie Redmayne is present and correct, all suited up, but he’s eclipsed by Mila Jovovich across the way — the preggers lady in red.
Gwyneth Paltrow arrives. Sleek and chic in a black tuxedo, she takes her seat opposite Tom Ford. RiRi is here, too, wearing one of Ford’s provocative ‘pasties’ numbers — white gown, totally sheer bodice, nipples just covered with sequins.
Miley Cyrus has also joined Ford’s Order of the Boob. She’s in one of his beaded, black harness dresses — there’s a layer of tulle behind the straps, but in the flashbulbs, it disappears and she looks nearly naked. The “just breathe” tattoo under her bra line (the first one she got, aged 17, back when she still had Hannah Montana hair) is clearly visible.
We’re at the ritzy amfAR Inspiration Gala fundraiser in LA, now in its fifth year, and given the context, plus the fact she has brought her mum along as her date, Cyrus’s dress — or lack thereof — should be shocking. Only somehow it isn’t, because our favourite provocative popstrel has made an art form out of flashing her assets. And like her Wrecking Ball tankini, this evening’s outfit is positively chaste compared to the bodysuits from her Bangerz tour. Or the pasties, silver wig, Lurex tights and denim cut-offs she wore to Art Basel last year.
“People like to judge me a lot of the time,” Cyrus, 22, tells me, with a shrug. Since there’s nothing she can do about it, she’s not going to try. “I am refusing to be a certain way, or dress a certain way.”
If you don’t like it, don’t look, right? But I have to say, it’s impossible not to stare at Cyrus in the flesh. On gossip mag covers the trainwreck stuff drags the eye — think “Miley finally admits: ‘I NEED HELP!’” or “Friends reveal: Miley’s married!” (She’s not.) Cyrus plays up to the headlines — ’gramming herself possibly/probably doing drugs, all that tongue-poking and crotch-grabbing. In January she shared a Photoshopped version of Kim’n’Kanye’s ‘Just Married’ biker-jacket pic with her 15.3 million Instagram followers — replacing Kimye’s mugs with her own and … Elvis Presley’s. No room just yet for Patrick Schwarzenegger’s, her boyfriend of four months. (Though seemingly happy to be photographed with him, Cyrus has kept schtum about the relationship — but recently Instagrammed that she has “da best bf eva”.)
Cyrus is happy to take on the media. Quite often, she wins. In person, though — and in this star-studded room — it’s not her celebrity that makes her so compelling, but the impression that, with Rihanna, she’s having more fun than anyone else. Oh, to be 20-not-much with the world in the palm of your hand. Who wouldn’t want a piece of the Miley-and- RiRi show? That’s what tonight feels like, despite its official purpose being to honour Tom Ford’s campaigning for amfAR (The American Foundation for AIDS Research).
Ford takes the stage and gives a speech that makes Paltrow cry. “I moved to New York in 1979, just before my 18th birthday,” he says. “Of my close friends at NYU, more than half of them had died from AIDS by 1990 … I remember the feeling of having dinner with a friend, or running into someone I hadn’t seen in a while, when the light would rake across their face and your heart sank — you knew … If I close my eyes, I can still feel the panic and fear; it was visceral, horrible.”
But we are here to empty pockets, not weep, and now it’s time for the charity auction. Timberlake drops $US80K on a Damien Hirst print, before Cyrus and Rihanna start bidding against Ford until the girls have spent $US600,000 between them. To date, amfAR has raised $US366 million to fund research, and aims to find a cure by 2020, but the stats remain sobering. Thirty-five million people live with HIV worldwide (most of them in Africa), a quarter of them don’t even know they have it. Every hour, nearly 240 people will contract HIV. In Australia, new infections are at a 20-year high.
The last National Survey of Australian Secondary Students, HIV/AIDS and Sexual Health found that 50 per cent of sexually active students only used condoms “sometimes” or “never”. The very least we can do is buy a lipstick — all the proceeds from sales of MAC Viva Glam’s limited-edition lipstick and lipgloss go to the MAC AIDS Fund, which supports people affected by HIV and AIDS. Ru Paul was Viva Glam’s first spokesperson, in 1994. Rihanna was in the hot seat last year. Cyrus is next. Her bright-pink shade is on sale now. She’s hoping people won’t buy it merely because it’s pretty, or “because it has my name on it”, but because “all the money goes to AIDS prevention and awareness”.
She’s also hoping it will act as a safe-sex wake-up call for young people (including the at-risk homeless kids she’s been supporting through the My Friend’s Place homeless youth shelter in LA), to get them “to think what it might mean for them, that they have to protect themselves and help protect their friends”.
It’s the morning after and worse for wear is the new black — Kelly Osbourne was so pie-eyed at the afterparty, she slurringly told me she’d stolen her polka-dot dress from Alex Perry on a visit to Australia — but Cyrus looks chipper. The make-up probably helps.
“I do my own,” she says, “because [otherwise] you sit in a [make-up] chair and then, all of a sudden, you come out and you’re not you any more. That freaks me out. I’m a little bit of a control freak, I guess.”
She does relinquish control when it comes to wardrobe. She’s been working with stylist Simone Harouche for the past five years. It was Harouche who conceived the Wrecking Ball look, which was actually a kids’ singlet by Hanes (the American equivalent of Bonds) and a pair of white Eres knickers. Harouche bought the sequined pieces from Australian label Discount Universe for Cyrus to perform in last time she was here, and enlisted Marc Jacobs and Jeremy Scott to design stage looks for Bangerz. The vintage Versace, the Céline and Prada shoes? Yep, all Harouche.
Cyrus enjoys dressing up but not shopping. She says she hates Rodeo Drive because the sales guys give her so much attitude. “You’ve seen Pretty Woman, obviously. Well, they are actually like that. If you walk in, they give you the worst look you’ve ever seen, and I am too outspoken to deal with those kinds of people.”
Today, the baby-pink vinyl crop-top and matching mega-wide-leg trousers by Manish Arora have Harouche’s imprint all over them. “This is my addition,” says Cyrus, pointing to a big plastic nappy pin she’s attached at the waist. Wobbling on one leg to check the sole of a pink suede stiletto that wouldn’t look amiss on Elle from Legally Blonde, she says, “Do I still have the Barneys sticker on my shoe? Yes, I do.”
Ask Cyrus for her definition of an attractive woman, and she goes off: “Females, oh god! I f*cking love them. Someone came up to me last night and was like, ‘Women f*cking love you,’ and I was like, ‘I f*cking love women, trust me.’ They are something so beautiful. This kind of sounds cheesy, but girls just rule. Because we have a sensitivity and passion you can’t find in other people.”
What other people? Men? “It’s in your demeanour as well,” she says, either cryptically or nonsensically (you be the judge). “There are some good vibrations that come off women that men can’t — oh, I’m going to get in trouble here, right? I always do — but maybe it is [simply that] women are born complicated,” she continues. “We’re used to over-thinking everything. Like, physically, guys can just wake up in the morning and they throw on a T-shirt.” If only girls had it so easy, huh? “We’ve been taught from the beginning that we have to think so much [about our appearance], and I think there’s something about me being comfortable with who I am without all that that [allows me to] do good things for younger women. But, that’s the thing about women!”
Um, what is, Miley? “We don’t have to put in all this effort and time. We’re too complicated from the beginning. [You see it] even with little boys and little girls, we have so many thoughts and … we put so much pressure on,” she says. “Even my mom, she’s taken on every problem I’ve ever had — if I am sick, she gets physically sick. I feel she takes it on because women just feel, like, 50 per cent, maybe more [emotion than men].” Pause. “I know that’s a hard thing to say — I mean, the per cent thing — but I think we’re just naturally born with that instinct.”
It can be hard to follow Cyrus when she starts speechifying. The words seem to tumble out before she has a chance to think them through, and that, combined with her tendency to leap from topic to topic, means the crux of what she says can often sound incoherent and naive — on paper, at least. But in person, there’s something undeniably attractive about the way she talks. Her eyes sparkle. There’s no artifice; she’s just saying what she thinks (which, probably, isn’t so far off what we all thought at 22).
Cyrus sees herself as a feminist and her performances, often criticised for being too sexual for young fans, as empowering. It gave her a thrill to wipe the floor with Ford at the auction. “Everyone came up to me last night, saying, ‘We’re so happy a girl was the highest bidder.’ All the suits are sitting there, Tom Ford is sitting there and I’m like, ‘[Tom] I am wearing your dress, I’m honouring you at this dinner, but I’m also about to BEAT YOU.’ That was fun. I think it’s cool to be a woman and be, like, super in charge.”
If that sounds at odds with her twerking (and by the way, twerking is so over), consider this, which she said in conversation with Tavi Gevinson for an Elle magazine cover last year: “Guy rappers grab their crotch all f*cking day and have hos around them, but no one talks about it. But if I grab my crotch and I have hot model bitches around me, I’m degrading women? I’m a woman, I should be able to have girls around me!”
According to Forbes magazine, Cyrus was the fourth highest paid woman in music in 2014, earning $US36 million
(Rihanna earned $US48 million, Beyoncé took the top spot with nearly double that).
“The world is in the prime of its feminine energy,” Cyrus tells me. “I think there’s been a real twist [and] women are starting to feel that. We were talking about women’s rights last night and [someone said], ‘Women are more suppressed right now than ever before.’ Well, I don’t think so — I think we’re more free than we’ve ever been. I’m seeing it everywhere; young women are totally ready to come out of their shells, to take on the world. There’s a lot of talk about feminism — people want to take that word and make it a bad thing, but it’s the greatest thing ever! Of course you’re a feminist, you know?”
I reckon much of the criticism of Cyrus is undue. It’s not her fault Frozen fans like her music. Maybe parents should think twice about taking their little princesses to Cyrus’s gigs rather than railing about how crude they are — Cyrus is not 15 any more, she long ago swapped Disney for The Flaming Lips.
She says Viva Glam appealed at a time when superficiality was getting her down. “There were so many people in my life that really didn’t matter, and what people would talk about when it came to me [that] didn’t really matter [either].” The absurdity — and the privilege — of celebrity is not lost on her. “This morning when I was driving here, it was early … You see people out and they’re paving the roads [and] cutting grass, and that’s their job — and our job is to put on some lipstick and get a picture taken!” she says, rolling her eyes. Fame, she adds, “is this huge honour, so you should take that honour and make something of it, that’s the only way you’re going to stay sane and keep it together.”
She admits to feeling overwhelmed sometimes. “There’s so much going on in the world, you want to try to fix everything,” she says. “You’ve got to start to really focus, otherwise you’re going to over-promise and underdeliver, which is the worst thing you can do.” In August she sent 22-year-old homeless man Jesse Helt on stage to accept her VMA Award on behalf of the 1.6 million runaways living on US streets. It backfired for Helt, who’d been dodging his probation, and he was subsequently arrested. “We’re the generation that thinks we’ve figured everything out. Well, we haven’t. We’re all still learning every day,” says Cyrus.
The Viva Glam campaign, the recording, the performing, the social media — it’s all about connecting. “It’s all speaking to people, isn’t it? It’s getting people to not feel alone. The greatest part about music is, if you hear a song that makes you feel a certain way, you feel a little less by yourself.”
MAC Viva Glam Miley Cyrus Lipstick, $36, and Tinted Lipglass, $35, are on sale now. Visit maccosmetics.com.au.