Before the first show of Paramore’s two-night sold-out run at Madison Square Garden in New York, Hayley Williams, the band’s frontwoman, was backstage reveling in ’90s nostalgia, listening to Seal and the Space Jam soundtrack. “I always want to tell people that it’s, like, very zen,” Williams tells Vanity Fair, reflecting on her preshow ritual. “But they were pretty chaotic days at MSG.” 

One consistent thing, Williams tells me over the phone, is the presence of her dog, Alf, (named after the titular character of the ’80s sitcom Alf: “He’s a morale boost for everyone”), and Brian O’Connor, her longtime hair and makeup artist, and cofounder of their shared venture, Good Dye Young, a hair dye company they launched in 2016. When she calls me to talk about the concert, she’s back in her glam chair with O’Connor prepping for an event at Ulta, where the product is launching in stores. “I can’t believe we’re in Ulta,” says the Grammy Award–winning artist. “It's sort of a fever dream because we’ve talked about it for so long.”

To commemorate Paramore’s return to the storied venue, Williams, O’Connor, and her stylist, Lindsey Hartman, collaborated on creating a ’60s-inspired look that evoked the likes of French New Wave actors and English supermodels rather than pop-punk icons. 

“Hayley Williams is not on Pinterest,” Williams jokes about finding inspiration. “But several fake names that I've come up with have so many Pinterest accounts because I forget my password.”

For Tuesday night’s show, Williams commanded the stage in an ultramini netted Stella McCartney dress atop a custom metallic bra top and hot pants, paired with matching silver Mary Jane shoes by Le Monde Béryl, (“I saw a couple of fans like, What the fuck are these? But you know what? They are very sensible and easy to kick around and do my little two-step in,” says Williams). Her signature shaggy bangs and sleek Twiggy-esque eyeliner completed the look. In all her sparkling minidress glory, Williams, centerstage, answers the question of, What if the muses of the ’60s were heard and not just seen? “Jane Birkin is one of the few muses we’ve had for this album cycle. It’s also very Jane Asher, a little bit of Mary Quant. A lot of leg and really short skirts,” says Williams. “Almost as a reflection back to the ’60s and women protesting. I feel like we’re in such a moment culturally and politically that is reflective of those times in the worst of ways. It feels regressive and terrifying. I’m not doing it in the most overt way, but I think trying to inject a little bit of awareness into the choices that we’re making fashionwise and beautywise is important.”

But Williams is no stranger to making overt political statements either. “I’ll be happy to tell you, I’m very fucking comfortable talking politics,” Williams recently told a crowd of festivalgoers in New Jersey. “And if you vote for Ron DeSantis, you’re fucking dead to me.” The day after that, she wore an “Abort the Supreme Court” shirt onstage in Boston. “I grew up in the church, so I’m very adverse to people thinking that they can just get onstage and be some sort of low-grade messiah. I’m not trying to do that,” she asserts. But she does feel that her platform comes with a responsibility to speak her mind. “Sometimes the best way to do it is with middle fingers and raw emotion,” says Williams. “That’s kind of where I’ve been for the last few weeks especially.”

At this point in her life, the 34-year-old Tennessee native, who has been in the public eye since she was 15, and a woman in a male-dominated genre, is into asserting herself and embracing change. It’s part of the reason she dyed her hair platinum blond before the tour started (with subtle orange tips, a nod to the bright orange and red hair she’s known for.)  “It was a way to assert that, hey, I’m still here underneath the facade of Paramore or the public perception or the persona that people attached to me,” says Williams. “I just needed to feel like my voice was in the conversation.” The change is also a reflection of where Williams, who has spoken openly about her divorce and subsequent therapy, is today. “Some of my best moments in terms of personal growth and overcoming shit that I’ve dealt with in the past 10 years of my life have been when I was blond,” says Williams. “Some of my happiest moments have been when I’m blond.”  

Despite Williams’s own style evolution, looking out into the crowd that night, it is clear that Y2K fashion is back in full force, and it’s not hard to spot Williams’s influence. The many ghosts of her past roam the arena in low-slung skinny jeans, side-swept bangs, and vibrant strands in every color of the rainbow head-banging. “It is crazy to look out and be like, Wow that person looks like me at 15 or 16 or 18 or 23,” says Williams. “It’s all these different moments in my life and my career reflected back in this really affirming way.” She’s decided that low-rise jeans aren’t for her, but Williams says she’s more concerned with leaving things like “misogyny, racism, and homophobia” firmly in the past. However, while we’re on the topic, she’d like to set the record straight on something: “I would like to go on record saying that I never had raccoon hair,” says Williams laughing, referring to the striped hairstyle popularized by scene music on Myspace in the early aughts. 

Over the years, Williams’s hair isn’t the only thing that’s changed. Sonically and aesthetically, over the course of six albums, Paramore has experimented endlessly. The band’s latest album, This is Why, is yet again an extension of Williams and the introduction of a different side of her. But Williams wasn’t really sure what it was about until fans pointed out introspective themes of grappling with duality. “I think fans kind of nailed it before I could. I find it interesting that I couldn’t see that myself,” says Williams. “Can you fit things in one of two categories, or should there be infinite categories? Are people good or evil, or are they good and evil? Are we all capable of the same terrible things as much as we’re all capable of the same incredible things?” 

At Madison Square Garden, Williams speaks to the box that the industry has always tried to put her and the band in. “We aren’t one thing or another,” says Williams onstage. She elaborates with me, “Once Paramore as a band understood that we don’t have to fit into this or that and we can just follow the feelings and trust it, that’s when we found a lot more freedom onstage, in the studio, with our fans.” Now that Paramore has been a band for almost 20 years, is Williams done changing? No. But does she still get nervous before she steps out onstage? “Definitely,” says Williams. “Nerves are a good sign though.”