The promotional campaign for Miley Cyrus‘s upcoming album Bass Persuades has begun in earnest, and the Miley Cyrus Bass Persuades visual language is making its intentions clear from the outset: this is not a pop-star softening her edges for a comeback. It is a studied exercise in punk-adjacent provocation, assembled with a stylist’s precision.
On 6 September, R&M Leathers shared two images on its official Instagram page showing Cyrus in an ensemble styled by her longtime collaborator Bradley Kenneth. The look centred on a dark triangle bralette with thin shoulder straps, worn with tiny dark micro shorts that sat low on her waist, and sheer dark tights underneath. The exposed midriff put her collection of tattoos on full view, while the Grammy winner wielded a long, dark leather whip that looped fluidly across her body, a prop that introduced what the images plainly wanted: a sense of motion, unruliness, controlled danger.
The R&M Leathers Kane Belt and the logic of exaggerated hardware
The centrepiece of the Miley Cyrus Bass Persuades styling was the R&M Leathers Kane Belt: an oversized, wide leather piece that wrapped low around the hips. It featured multi-row metallic studding bordering its edges, large silver grommets running along its length, and a massive rounded rectangular buckle hung off-centre. The proportions were deliberately excessive (the belt wider and heavier than the shorts beneath it) and that excess is precisely the point.
Heavy hardware in fashion carries its own semiotic freight: it borrows from bondage aesthetics, biker culture, and the kind of rock wardrobe that reads as both armour and invitation. Against the minimalism of the bralette and the barely-there shorts, the belt functions as the visual anchor of the whole composition, the thing that gives weight to what would otherwise be pure exposure. Cyrus’s hair, loose and tousled with curtain bangs and piecey layers, added a studied dishevelment to the hardware formality. Her makeup (dark-rimmed eyes, heavily smudged black eyeliner, winged shadow, neutral lip) completed the rockstar-off-duty register.
The two images shot in starkly different lighting conditions made the contrast legible in both directions. The first, in black and white, flattened the look into bold silhouette: the belt’s geometry, the whip’s arc, the body’s lines. The second, bathed in red light, cast a warm, high-octane atmosphere that pushed the same image into something more explicitly theatrical.
Hollywood Bowl shows and what Bass Persuades is building towards
The campaign imagery is not free-floating provocation: it is promotional work with a fixed destination. According to Good Morning America, Cyrus is set to return to the stage for two shows at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on 16 and 18 October, marking a significant live return for an artist whose last album cycle played out largely through recorded and visual media rather than live performance.
The Miley Cyrus Bass Persuades campaign, then, reads as a coherent build: from the R&M Leathers images, to the album release, to two nights in a venue that holds both intimate and monumental associations in Los Angeles’s cultural geography. The whip, the hardware, the smudged eyeliner, they are not incidental styling choices. They are the opening argument of a campaign that culminates on a stage.
What Bradley Kenneth and Cyrus have assembled here is a mood board that borrows from punk, heavy metal, and performance art without fully committing to any of them, which is, in its own way, the most pop-star move available. The visual references are legible enough to signal edge, controlled enough to stay commercial. The Kane Belt holds it all together, literally and otherwise.
