Story at a glance
- Billie Eilish’s sense of fashion has been dissected repeatedly throughout her rise to fame.
- At the first concert of her world tour, the artist seemed to respond to the public discussion of what she was wearing.
- Eilish challenged critics to consider the double standards she faces as a female artist.
Ever since Billie Eilish came onto the scene with “Ocean Eyes” in 2016, people have been baffled by the baggy, ill-fitting clothing the 18-year-old pop star wears. Her style has been labeled everything from “timeless“ to “the future of fashion“ and even “outrageous.”
Eilish herself has been pretty mum on the subject, but she revealed in a 2019 Calvin Klein advertisement that her clothing choices were a form of self-defense.
“Nobody can have an opinion because they haven’t seen what’s underneath,” she said in the ad. “Nobody can be like she’s slim thick, she’s not slim thick, she’s got a flat ass, she’s got a fat ass. No one can say any of that because they don’t know.”
Still, oversized clothes haven’t stopped conjecture over where her style comes from or whether it will change. On the first night of her world tour, Eilish seemed to address the constant speculation in a video preceding the song, “All The Good Girls Go To Hell.”
“Some people hate what I wear, some people praise it. Some people use it to shame others, some people use it to shame me. But I feel you watching, always. And nothing I do goes unseen,” she said in the video, while removing layers of clothing down to her bra and then sinking into a pool of black liquid.
Eilish has addressed slut-shaming in public commentary of women’s fashion before. In a 2019 interview with Pharrell, she said that even praise of her style can be double-edged.
“[Even] from my parents, [the] positive [comments] about how I dress have this slut-shaming element. Like, ‘I am so glad that you are dressing like a boy, so that other girls can dress like boys, so that they aren’t sluts.’ That’s basically what it sounds like to me. And I can’t [overstate how] strongly I do not appreciate that, at all,” she told Pharrell.
The video set the tone of Eilish’s world tour starting in Florida and taking her across Europe, Asia and South America.
“Would you like me to be smaller? Weaker? Softer? Taller? Would you like me to be quiet? Do my shoulders provoke you? Does my chest? Am I my stomach? My hips? The body I was born with, is it not what you wanted? If what I wear is comfortable, I am not a woman. If I shed the layers, I am a slut,” she continued in the video.
At the end, she turned the spotlight back on the audience.
“If I wear more, if I wear less, who decides what that makes me? What that means? Is my value based only on your perception? Or is your opinion of me not my responsibility?” she asked.
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