Most celebrities ease into reinvention with a new haircut or a season of True Detective. Not Katy Perry.
The 41-year-old pop star spent 2025 behaving as if she were the star of an experimental performance-art piece about how wealth, fame, and unlimited access to private aviation erode any sense of coherent identity.
Her whole year was so disjointed and strange; on paper, it reads like a script written by a writers’ room of feuding couples on the brink of divorce, each anonymously adding plotlines that the others would later deny.
Things were already wobbly when she attempted her grand pop comeback at the end of last year. 143, the album she framed as her love letter to fans, arrived with lengthy Instagram essays about healing, history, angels, and seeing the number 341 everywhere.
But none of it landed quite how she hoped. The lead single Woman’s World was called vapid, outdated, and ‘as empowering as a Vagisil advert,’ by critics. Fans complained it sounded like a money-laundering scheme.
And her decision to collaborate with Dr. Luke on her new music, a producer who was accused of sexually abusing popstar Kesha for years, was something that many people found not just disappointing but genuinely morally compromising.
Katy’s whole appeal used to be that she knew she was ridiculous, and by satirising the bubble-gum pink of performative femininity, she created something freeing, meaningful, and even a little rebellious.
When she popped out of cupcakes or shot whipped cream from her bra, it felt like something unapologetically camp, a clever wink to the absurdity of pop divadom.
But in 2025, that wink began to look suspiciously like a wide-eyed blink.
Even if it weren’t for the Dr Luke controversy and even if her new music was catchy, in a post-Roe v. Wade era in which women’s rights and autonomy are under threat across the globe, Perry’s brand of hyper-femme play-acting is no longer appealing.
Instead, it reads as disconnected from reality and more than a little privileged.
Then came the breakup with longtime fiancé Orlando Bloom. In a different year, it might have been bigger headline news, but in 2025 it was merely the starter pistol for a much stranger romantic plotline.
Within months, Katy reappeared on the world stage attached to a man no algorithm would ever have predicted: Justin Trudeau, the former prime minister of Canada, owner of an unfortunate brownface archive, and a political brand that attempted to be so photogenic it occasionally forgot to be ideological.
Their romance entered the cultural canon of nonsensical celebrity pairings in 2025, alongside Anna Wintour and Bill Nighy, or Billy Ray Cyrus and Elizabeth Hurley.
Shocked fans wondered: What do Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau even talk about? Climate grief while aboard yachts? Feminist space tourism? The spiritual significance of having as many homes as there are chakras in the human body?
They look like a couple from The White Lotus brought to life midway through their villain arc, and as images circulated in the media showing Trudeau gazing at her adoringly and Katy gazing back as if trying to remember whether Canada has states or provinces, Katy became even more inexplicable to fans.
And of course, let’s not forget Katy went to space. For ten minutes.
The mission was framed as a feminist milestone, but the public reaction was less ‘Yas, glass ceiling!’ and more ‘Why is Katy Perry emitting the carbon footprint of a medium-sized nation to do zero-gravity TikToks when fewer and fewer people can afford their groceries?’
The cringe was biblical. She kissed the ground on landing, she cried about ‘belonging,’ she clutched a daisy for her daughter like she was going to space for 10 years and not 10 minutes.
Even other celebrities lined up to roast the flight, with Emily Ratajkowski calling it ‘end times stuff,’ while Lily Allen asked why we were sending Katy Perry to space for absolutely no reason, and Vicky Pattinson accused Blue Origin of insulting feminism by launching wealthy women into the void in a vanity project.
Yet even as the backlash escalated, Katy seemed genuinely shocked that people did not grasp the profundity of her cosmic awakening.
Earth, however, did not offer a softer landing for her reputation.
Turning 41, she celebrated backstage on tour by picking up her birthday cake and throwing it full-speed at a crew member’s head. The cake detonated across the floor, and dancers gathered around the wreckage, scooping it up like peasants foraging after a royal feast.
And there stood Justin Trudeau, smiling with the strained politeness of a man who is no stranger to faux pas. The internet erupted with fans analysing the Marie Antoinette-esque symbolism and demanding to know: did Justin Trudeau eat floor cake, or has Canada suffered enough?
By the end of the year, Katy’s public image had exploded, perhaps irreparably, miles above the stratosphere.
But, realistically, it wasn’t that Katy Perry changed so much in 2025; it’s that the world did. Pop culture this year was sharper, darker, and more self-aware in ordr to reflect a global landscape of unrest and uncertainty.
The public clung to icons who displayed political literacy, ethical consistency, and at least a vague awareness of global collapse.
Watching Katy insist on her cartoon universe while everyone else refreshed the news to see who was getting deported from America that day felt less like escapism and more like the privileged denial of a rich, disconnected white woman.
The pop star no longer offered us escapism in her art and persona, but a stark reminder of the inequality and unjust hierarchy many of us face in our daily lives.
So no, I am not over the bizarre year Katy Perry had in 2025 or her weird Instagram numerology essays that she posted with the emotional urgency of a woman who just got broken up with in an airport Pret.
It was chaotic, fascinating, and deeply revealing: a pop star trying to live in a fantasy world when the rest of us are stuck in the burning real one.
If 2010 Katy Perry gave us the fantasy and escapism of Teenage Dream, 2025 Katy Perry gave us something else entirely – a live-action dismantling of celebrity privilege and the corrupting, disconnecting power of wealth and late-stage capitalism.
And in a strange way, it might be her most memorable, powerful era yet — whether she intended it or not.
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