The real reason Billie Eillish changed her way of dressing
On Tuesday, a photo of this artist who revolutionized the world of pop, became a viral topic. Why does it matter that a woman wears a tight top that is ordinary. "
"Do you really want to go back in time?" That was the only response that Billie Eillish, the American artist who became known on social networks 4 years ago, when she was 14 years old, and who in 2019 became a global phenomenon with the song 'Bad Guy', gave to the world after a totally normal photo of her went viral: an 18-year-old woman walking down a Los Angeles street in sandals, a tight top, and shorts.
daily reminder that billie eilish is sexier than you pic.twitter.com/rw5pAjaFQK
— h (@hatimypunto) October 12, 2020
The photograph, taken by a papparazzi, was published by the British newspaper 'Daily Mail' last Monday. Everyone talked about that photograph. Eilish has been an artist who has been characterized by wearing loose clothing in her public appearances and in her music videos, precisely as a criticism of the way in which culture tends to sexualize women's bodies. "What I like about dressing in clothes that are 800 sizes larger than mine is that it doesn't give anyone a chance to judge the way your body looks," she told Vogue last year. Australia. “I want to wear layers and layers and layers to be mysterious. You don't know what's underneath and you don't know what's above either. "
Leave Billie Eilish and her body alone fuckin weirdos
— Mae Muller 🌹 (@maemuller_) October 14, 2020
For this reason, the fact that thousands of people gave their opinion around the internet about the way in which Eilish had decided to dress in a city where, at this time, the evenings reach a temperature of around 30 degrees Celsius, precisely reaffirmed her criticism. . And her response pointed to the biggest statement she has ever made on that topic:
"Do you really want to go back in time?"
Along with that answer, on Instagram, was an image of a short that she presented in May of this year titled 'Not My Responsibility', where she appears in a dark environment and little by little begins to take off her clothes until, as in the photo, with a shirt attached to his body, a common top. As that happens, she whispers a poem: “You have opinions about my opinions, about my music, about my clothes, about my body. Some people hate what I wear, others highlight it. Some use it to embarrass others, others to embarrass me, ”she says.
And she continues: “Isn't the body I was born with the one you want? If I see what is comfortable, I am not a woman. If I take off the layers, I'm just anyone. Even if you have never seen my body, you judge it, and you judge me by it. Why?".
The answer is an invitation to reflect. Why do people care about other people's bodies? "Sometimes I feel trapped by the character that I created [from the way I dress] because I think people don't see me as a woman," Eilish told ‘British GQ’ magazine when asked about that video. “That short is about that. It's me saying: Look, there is a body under all these clothes and you don't see it. Isn't that a shame? But my body is mine and yours is yours. Our bodies are kind of the only real thing that is really ours. And I can see or show it when I want ”.
The photos published by the ‘Daily Mail’ have not been the only ones that have put Billie Eilish in the middle of this debate. In mid-2019, other images of her with a white t-shirt that showed her cleavage appeared on Twitter. Shortly afterwards she spoke to Elle magazine and said that she did not understand why she was making such a fuss: “My breasts were trending on Twitter! Number one! Why? All the media wrote about my breasts! I was born with breasts, bro! ”.
Her comments are still valid. Even after those two photos and the short that he presented when he was on tour, the fact that something as simple as a top generates a whole wave of opinions about a woman's body should, at the very least, invite reflection on the culture that turns an everyday image into a global conversation piece.
However, this time, Eilish added something else: she shared in her Instagram story the video that a TikTok influencer posted, as if it were a premonition, just a week ago. "We have to start normalizing real bodies," the video says. "Instagram is not real."
