For those who haven’t seen the video, Ariana takes on the role of “Pepper” - a woman auditioning for “FAME” in the hopes of becoming the next signed artist. Throughout the video, she performs multiple roles, each time embodying a different persona, only to be consistently critiqued, rejected, and labeled “not good enough” by her executives.

It’s a stunning film directed by Christian Breslauer, gorgeously shot on VistaVision. It’s cinematic, rich and beautiful… with an unexpected twist: her decapitating her critics with a chainsaw.

It’s utterly brilliant. Think about it - women have been taught to be polite and agreeable from birth, a reality grossly exacerbated by fame. Even in 2026, society has created a suffocatingly small box where women can exist peacefully: Be confident, but not loud. Don’t be too fat, but don’t be too thin either. Age gracefully, but don’t look old. Get Botox and lip fillers, but don’t look fake.

The film depicts that brutality beautifully. The women auditioning feel creepily close to an industrial assembly line as they move in unison - hair neat, clothes pressed, completely mouldable. Ariana takes a ticket again and again as the tension builds, signalling a relentless pressure to perform - never leaving enough room to process the last critique before the next rejection hits.

When she finally opens the floodgates of her rage and kills her critics, the once-palatable women erupt in triumphant unity as she emerges from the audition room blood-soaked. It is a breathtaking metaphor for the collective rage so many carry, yet rarely feel safe enough to release.

I can’t even begin to fathom how it must feel to live this way in the spotlight, and I’m obsessed that she’s created a music video on it. To put something so controversial out at her level of fame - where she’s expected to do the expected - is incredibly brave.

Ariana spoke of having a habit of editing her lyrics to make them more palatable, but this time, she allowed herself to be raw and unfiltered, holding zero fucks back.

“I usually am too shy to tap into that.” she told Apple Music.
“This time, I didn’t filter as much as I usually do. I usually do a lot of rewrites and make things a little kinder. This time, I didn’t.”

The result is a stunning representation of how it feels to be constantly provoked, prodded, and judged. While a risky choice, it paid off artistically - even if the public wasn’t ready for it.

Some have called the video crazy, with many others hyper-focusing on her weight. Whether these comments are said from a place of concern or care isn’t the point. We don’t own the right to police an artist or diagnose a human being.

The irony is that the public reaction actually completes her artistic statement: no matter how loudly a woman speaks, people will still focus on how she looks saying it.

Outside of the commentary, ‘Petal’ stands on its own as a disruptive, violent, and shockingly brilliant piece of art.

Watch Petal and view credits here
Stills: YouTube

About The Author

Connie Hollyer is a Creative Advisor with 13+ years experience leading creative direction and strategy for some of the world’s most respected brands across luxury fashion, lifestyle, publishing, music and art.

She creates brand worlds under her practice, CONNIE HOLLYER STUDIO, and is the writer of Book 13: A Portrait of Identity Death and Rebirth, releasing September 2026.

Working for DIESEL back then was my first real introduction to disruptive creative work, and a potent lesson in what it actually means to take risks. And today, as DIESEL experiences a massive cultural resurgence, their audacity feels more relevant than ever.

Most creative work - brands, writing, art, music - in 2026 is safe. Not bad, just profoundly, predictably safe. There’s a club most of us have joined that we don’t even know we’re a part of:

Post X amount of times a day and you’ll become visible.
Find a customer problem, and advertise the solution in 60 days or less.
Or if you’re an artist - slap on the trending audio or “reveal” your work.

Somewhere along the rise of AI and algorithmic optimisation, we’ve forgotten how to be rebellious. Forgotten we’re rebellious. We’ve found ourselves trading our raw truth for metric goalposts that never stop moving.

But DIESEL was never built to play it safe. Like a lot of us, it’s simply not in their DNA.

Another campaign they became known for ran in 1995, when they created an Ad photographed by David LaChapelle fronted by two male sailors kissing. The ad dropped shortly after the U.S. military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy - which actively banned openly LGBTQ+ individuals from serving in the military.

Photographer David LaChapelle told iD years later:

“We didn’t do it to win awards or anything.”

“I just wanted to make a statement commemorating that gay people had been in the military since there ever was a military. Not only should we ‘allow them’ in, we should fucking thank them. That’s what Diesel did and allowed me to do.” - David LaChapelle

This is the part where I could say DIESEL didn’t make millions by playing it safe, but that would be missing the point entirely. The point, as LaChapelle put it so eloquently, isn’t about manipulating an outcome. It’s about having the courage to create something far beyond our comfort zone, simply because we believe in something greater. So many of us—as artists, writers, brand founders—are sitting on this kind of creative fire, yet we constantly suffocate it.

We worry we’ll be labelled too much.
That people won’t “get it”.
Or even worse - it will be met with crickets (cue the invisibility wound).

But work that shifts culture rarely arrives fully formed, understood, or accepted at first. Sometimes the impact happens decades later.

And this is the tension.

The safe work - on some level - guarantees a small predictable drip of algorithmic validation and steady sales. The unsafe work however, guarantees nothing. We could put our heart and soul into something, only for people to wake up the next morning and not give a shit.

But what we often forget is that the safe route ultimately is the riskiest of all, because it guarantees something far worse: that we will die never knowing what we were capable of.

We need to ask ourselves one thing and one thing only:

Is powerful art ever safe art?

Maybe it’s time we stop waiting for the permit.

About The Author:
Connie Hollyer is an Artist, Writer + Creative Advisor with 13+ years experience leading some of the world’s most respected brands in the creative industries - from luxury fashion, lifestyle and publishing to music and art.

Explore The Residency, a private 8-week creative journey for brave creatives, artists and Founders.

Something that will sell.

Yet underneath the pressure, something else is burning within them from the inside out.

It comes and goes, but never really goes away. A suppressed desire to drop the mask, to stop pretending to fit in. Or a burrowing anger over how things are in their industry or the world.

My response?

“Your art is medicine.
And people are dying for it.”

Because if they’re feeling this way - on some level, everyone else is too. People are waiting for an artist, musician, writer, brand owner - whoever - to step forward so they can follow them.

It takes guts. But that’s exactly why it’s so exciting - it’s the shift from creating a product to sell to offering an antidote people want.

Take the music industry - in a lot of clubs people are filming more than they dance - yet buried beneath the mounting social conditioning is a feral urge within all of us to dance like no-one’s watching. To experience real and raw human connection again where we don’t give a fuck about posting the moment, because we’re simply living it. If this is the suppressed desire, a DJ or promoter brave enough to launch a night banning phones is the antidote.

Or think about an artist known for using flowers as their medium. Florals are packaged as feminine and delicate, but there’s a building movement of men starting to embrace their own beauty and vunerability. An artist ready to embody this could create a signature series that combined male portraiture, poems on masculinity with delicate florals.

Like any medicine, there are side effects. A club with no organic reach could disappear quickly. A controversial art campaign could feel confronting to those who don’t “get it”.

But the biggest risk isn’t rejection or low sales - it’s staying suppressed because of our own fear. We can always recover from a commercial “failure,” but overcoming our repressed shadows and desires is where real creative fulfilment lives.

When we drop the need for validation and embrace the risk of genuine self-expression, disruptive art becomes the natural byproduct.

“What do people want?” becomes “What is the medicine my art offers?”

The only question left is: are you brave enough to prescribe it?

About the author:
Connie Hollyer is an Artist, Writer + Creative Advisor with 13+ years experience leading some of the world’s most respected brands in the creative industries - from luxury fashion, lifestyle and publishing to music and art.

Explore The Residency, a private 8-week creative journey for disruptive creatives, artists and brand owners.

Consider this - a standard perfume ad even in 2026 is polished, glossy and often cheesy. And honestly? Completely forgettable. Spike Jonze didn’t just challenge classic perfume ads, he completely subverted them. To this day, Kenzo World still holds its place as a defiant example of creative rebellion.

Instead of classic choreography, we got fingers shooting laser beams.
Instead of a polished model, we got a feral woman.
Instead of 30 seconds, the ad ran for 3.5 minutes.

But there’s something deeper here too. The way Margaret Qualley moves in this film feels like a physical exorcism of the modern female experience. We are taught from birth to be polished, polite and digestible, constantly masking how we feel to make others feel comfortable. This ad is the antidote. It’s a gorgeous, violent release of the wildness, weirdness, and absolute aliveness we’ve been conditioned to suppress. It’s a perfect representation of what happens when we stop trying to be a 'good girl' and just let ourselves be feral.

And boy does it pay off.

Because being normal didn’t get Qualley the part.
And being normal doesn’t make great art.

When auditioning for Spike Jonze, Qualley dropped her socially acceptable mask and went full-on exorcism, later admitting in this behind-the-scenes clip:

“I either got the job, or he’s going to think I’m a psychopath.”

The risk of looking completely insane landed her the lead role for one of the world’s biggest luxury brands in one of the most iconic ads ever made.

But surely the world responded with second-hand embarrassment?

Quite the opposite.

The video received critical acclaim, and even Taylor Swift’s “Delicate” Music Video was criticised by the media for allegedly copying the film just two years later.

Kenzo, Jonze and Qualley took the risk. The commercial world followed - because secretly, even if the masses don’t want to admit it, we’re all waiting for permission to be strange.

We can take so many lessons from this short film. But the most powerful one of all?

Great art is vulnerable art. And sometimes vulnerability isn’t sharing our tears or trauma, but the part of us that’s frickin’ weird.

Perhaps we all need to release our inner freaks sometimes - our most unforgettable work might just require it.

For full list of Kenzo World credits here

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We see the followers, money, lifestyle, or recognition and feel it’s something we must attain to reach fulfilment. But it’s rarely our honest desire. What we’re actually searching for is what success represents - the feeling of finally being seen, held and visible. A feeling we haven’t quite been able to sit with, or face with full integrity.

The irony is, when we’re focused on validation outside of us, we hand over our power to that thing completely.

We are never able to feel truly secure, because we rely on having the likes, the followers, the home, the car - whatever it is - to prove it. And since life can change at any moment, we make ourselves powerless to our circumstances.

Money in = we’re successful.
Money out = we’re a failure.

Likes go up, we feel good.
Likes go down, we feel like shit.

We can see this play out in real time, with the hiding of the like counter on Instagram - but only on posts that get lower engagement. By doing this we are literally saying our voice, our content, our work is only valuable if our audience validates it first. And if they don’t, it should stay hidden. We should stay hidden.

What feels like such a small, meaningless act reinforces the very thing we’re trying to escape - that we are only valuable when we’reThis it leaks far beyond social media, and into all human connection around us. We feel inferior when we’re not stacking up against the definition of success that only exists within our mind. To fix this problem that doesn’t actually exist, we subconsciously create an impossible version of ourselves to live up to. We reject our own humanity, our imperfections, and our “failures”. We become accidentally inauthentic - only showing one side of ourselves to the world - which paradoxically stops real connection from forming. Because true connection isn’t built through power - it’s created through vulnerability.

This isn’t just dangerous to us as human beings. It’s dangerous to art itself. The world’s most life-changing art is often the most messy, raw and real.

If success requires an audience, we will always be performing. That’s an exhausting existence to maintain.

Which leads us to the question - is the “success” we want fame, or is it actually connection? Is it really the followers we want, or is it someone who sees us for who we really are, and leans in closer to the parts of us we ourselves deny?

What if success was seeing ourselves, and not abandoning ourselves for validation?
What if it was not hiding the like counter?
What if it was sharing the art that felt most authentic regardless of how it was received?

When we no longer need the fame, the likes or the recognition to feel seen - we stop feeling invisible. We confirm our right to exist, exactly as we are.

By Artist + Writer Connie Hollyer