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Ariana Grande’s Vogue Cover Video Performance | Vogue

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Ariana Grande turned her own head into a soundstage, and Vogue got there first.

On July 9, 2019, Vogue published an exclusive music video for “in my head,” one of the most confessional tracks on Ariana Grande’s chart-topping February release “thank u, next,” timed to drop alongside her August cover story, “Ariana Grande on Grief and Growing Up.” Rather than a traditional performance clip, the video drops Grande into a stark white lightbox room built to look like the inside of her own mind, where she dances, shoulder-pops, and paces through the confessional lyrics in real time. It’s a small, tightly produced piece of visual fashion editorial dressed up as a music video, and it plays that way from the first frame.

• Vogue released the “in my head” video on July 9, 2019, exclusively tied to Grande’s August cover story about grief and growing up.
• Director Bardia Zeinali and fashion editor Jorden Bickham built the concept around a single white lightbox set, shot on 35mm Kodak film by director of photography Kelly Jeffrey at Pier 59 Studios in New York.
• Visual effects house FRENDER, supervised by Max Colt, added surreal touches — disembodied thigh-high boots and floating ponytails that strut and dance independently around Grande inside the room.

A Song Built for a Single Room

“in my head” was never a single with a splashy rollout — it’s an album cut that leans on internal monologue, the kind of track that describes wanting someone despite knowing better. Zeinali’s decision to stage the entire video inside one white room mirrors that claustrophobia literally: no locations, no crowd, no narrative detour. Grande is left alone with the lyric, and the camera treats the space like the inside of her skull rather than a set.

The aesthetic borrows heavily from 1990s Hype Williams music videos — fisheye lenses, aerial drops, sudden zooms — a lineage Vogue’s own coverage pointed to directly. It’s a deliberate throwback choice that gives a minimalist set some visual teeth, letting Kelly Jeffrey’s camera do the work that a bigger budget location shoot would normally handle.

The Wardrobe Doing the Talking

With no dialogue and one location, the clothes carry a lot of the storytelling. Grande wears a crystal-trimmed puffer jacket and matching skirt from New York label AREA, a Givenchy bodysuit, and her now-signature thigh-high Yandy/Pleaser boots — the same boot silhouette FRENDER’s effects team later animates into a disembodied dancer of its own. Jorden Bickham’s styling keeps the palette high-fashion and stripped of color, which lets the white room swallow everything except Grande and her outfits.

The room doesn’t just frame Grande — FRENDER’s effects send her own boots and ponytail dancing around her without a body attached, like stray thoughts she can’t quite shake.

That effects work, credited to VFX supervisor Max Colt with on-set VFX by Izzi Galindo and VFX makeup artist Christina Philippou, is what turns a styling exercise into something closer to a mental-health metaphor — loose limbs and hair moving on their own inside a brain-shaped box.

The Crew Behind the Concept

The credits read like a full-scale fashion production rather than a quick label upload. Choreography came from Brian and Scott Nicholson, with dancers Christina Glur, Mao Kawakami, Luz Remigio, Rim Taya Shawki, and Tailor Cha Cha filling out the room alongside Grande. Hair stylist Josh Liu worked with extensions from Indique and Insert Name Here, colored by Indique’s Joyce Koomson, while Daniel Chinchilla handled makeup. Production design came from Lauren Nikrooz, with editing by Graham Patterson at Modern Post and color work by Tim Masick at Company — the kind of specialist lineup usually reserved for a magazine’s biggest cover shoots rather than a single YouTube upload.

Producers Kalena Yiaueki (N6) and Dayna Carney (Vogue) built the shoot around Grande’s cover story rather than around a label release date, which explains why the video reads less like promotion for “thank u, next” — an album that had already spent months at the top of the charts by July 2019 — and more like a companion piece to the print interview.

Fans looking for more of Grande’s visual world, or for the broader wave of pop stars leaning into high-concept fashion videos this cycle, can track the trend over in Trending Music, while the celebrity-side conversation around her Vogue cover and interview is filed under Trending Celebrities. “In my head” isn’t getting a sequel video or a single push — it’s a one-off, tucked inside a magazine profile, and that’s exactly the scale Zeinali and Bickham built it for.