From the get-go, Billie Eilish made a fashion statement with her androgynous style of baggy, oversized clothing – and pretty much kicked off the trend among her fans. She’s been candid about how her negative body image has influenced her style choices: “The only reason I did it was ‘cos I hated my body,” she shared with Dazed in April 2020.
She also came out with a short film last year called Not My Responsibility, where she addressed her critics and questioned why people are so concerned with her appearance.
“Some people hate what I wear, some people praise it. Some people use it to shame others, some people use it to shame me,” Billie says in the voiceover.
“If I wear what is comfortable, I am not a woman. If I shed the layers, I’m a s—,” she added. “Though you’ve never seen my body, you still judge it, and judge me for it. Why?”
Last October, a paparazzi photo of her went viral because she was snapped wearing a tank top and shorts – which she addressed during her annual interview with Vanity Fair, which came out in December.
“There’s this picture of me running from my car to my brother’s front door on like a 110 degree day in a tank top,” she said. “And people were like, ‘Damn, Billie got fat!’ And I’m like, ‘Nope, this is how I look, you’ve just never seen it before!’…I love having kids relate to me and tell me that I make them feel comfortable in their bodies. If I can do anything, I want to do that.”
In her March cover story interview with Vanity Fair, the 19-year-old singer talked about the viral photo again – apparently, her friends and loved ones became concerned about all the comments, because of her history of self-harm.
“I think that the people around me were more worried about it than I was because the reason I used to cut myself was because of my body,” she tells the magazine. “To be quite honest with you, I only started wearing baggy clothes because of my body.”
But, thankfully, she has a much better relationship with her body now.
“I was really, really glad though, mainly, that I’m in this place in my life, because if that had happened three years ago, when I was in the midst of my horrible body relationship—or dancing a ton, five years ago, I wasn’t really eating,” she continues. “I was, like, starving myself.”
“I remember taking a pill that told me that it would make me lose weight and it only made me pee the bed—when I was 12,” she says. “It’s just crazy. I can’t even believe, like I—wow. Yeah.”
Circling back to the pap photo, she said, “I thought that I would be the only one dealing with my hatred for my body, but I guess the internet also hates my body. So that’s great.”
Billie is about to open up even more with fans in her upcoming Apple TV+ documentary Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry set to drop on February 26 – including details of a past romantic relationship she has never publicly talked about before.
“It’s really about my life, me, in such a way that I was not expecting, and was pretty brutal to relive. I was going through hell in certain parts of my life, and I had no idea anyone was seeing it,” she said.
