“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,” Billie Eilish says in a new cover story with Vanity Fair. The 19-year-old Billie has been open with her struggles with self-harm and a negative body image, and she shared just how bad things got when she was still a young girl. “To be quite honest with you, I only started wearing baggy clothes because of my body,” said the “Therefore I Am” singer. “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.
“I was, like, starving myself,” added Billie. “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. It’s just crazy. I can’t even believe, like I—wow. Yeah. 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.” When Vanity Fair’s Keziah Weir suggests that the Internet hates “all women’s bodies,” Billie retorted with, “The internet hates women.”
Billie’s comments seemingly referenced how the internet almost broke itself in October 2020, after Billie was photographed out and about in a tank-top and sweat-shorts. It was a rare sighting of Billie in something other than her signature baggy streetwear, and the response for the photos prompted Billie to share a TikTok from influencer Chizi Duru, one that requested people “start normalizing real bodies, okay? “Not everybody has a wagon behind them, okay? Guts are normal. They’re normal. Boobs sag….especially after breastfeeding. Instagram isn’t real!”
Months before Billie’s photographs went viral online, she spoke with GQ magazine about why she started wearing such oversized, figure-hiding outfits. “Here’s a bomb for you: I have never felt desired,” she told the publication. “My past boyfriends never made me feel desired. None of them. And it’s a big thing in my life that I feel I have never been physically desired by somebody.”
“I dress the way I dress as I don’t like to think of you guys — I mean anyone, everyone — judging it, or the size of it,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that I won’t wake up one day and decide to wear a tank top, which I have done before.” Now that she has a much better “body relationship,” she will likely wear such outfits again.
