Billie Eilish, 19, looked back at the photo of herself in a tank top that set the Internet ablaze in her cover story for the March 2021 issue of Vanity Fair. Surprisingly, Billie revealed that it was her team who was more “worried” about the body-shaming the photo sparked in Oct. 2020, which came from trolls used to the pop star’s almost exclusively baggy wardrobe.
“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 admitted in her interview with Vanity Fair, which came out on Jan. 25. “To be quite honest with you, I only started wearing baggy clothes because of my body.”
Billie revealed that she has a healthier mindset when it comes to her body image now, though — which is why she could withstand the unkind comments from last fall. “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,” Billie explained.
She went on to explain the extent of her past struggles with weight. “I was, like, starving myself,” Billie told the magazine. “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.” She acknowledged that it seems like all women are subject to this body scrutiny, adding, “The internet hates women.”
This isn’t the first time Billie has reacted to the uproar that her tank top photo caused. In an earlier interview with Vanity Fair, conducted in Nov. 2020, Billie explained what she was doing when the viral photo was taken. “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. 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!’ So that’s the most current [rumor],” she said during the video interview.