Billie Eilish is speaking out about her complicated feelings about her body when she was a teenager.
During a recent interview for Vogue’s first-ever video cover, Eilish discussed her relationship with her body and what it took for her to overcome the negativity that came with it. Years of injuries had left her in a lot of pain and hatred for her body, she explained.
Prior to her breakthrough into the music industry with the 2015 release of “Ocean Eyes,” Eilish aspired to be a dancer. Unfortunately, an injury to her growth plate when she was 13 forced her to rethink her goals and find a new passion.
“Going through my teenage years of hating myself and all that stupid s–t, a lot of it came from my anger toward my body and how mad I was at how much pain it’s caused me and how much I’ve lost because of things that happened to it,” Eilish said. “I got injured right after we made ‘Ocean Eyes,’ so music kind of replaced dancing.”
“I felt like my body was gaslighting me for years,” she said. “I had to go through a process of being like, my body is actually me. And it’s not out to get me.”
Eilish was eventually diagnosed with hypermobility, a syndrome in which an individual has overly flexible joints, causing them to bend more than they should, which can be painful.
During the interview, Eilish’s mother, Maggie Baird, gave further insight into her diagnosis, saying that “stuff that you and I could do that would help us, like certain kinds of massage or chiropractors, could actually hurt her.”
This isn’t the first time the “Bad Guy” singer has discussed her body, as her style and body image issues have remained a source of discussion.
She told The Guardian in August 2021 that she has a “terrible relationship with (her) body” and that she has to “disassociate from the ideas (she has) of (her) body” during performances or her performance will suffer.
“I wear clothes that are bigger and easier to move in without showing everything — they can be really unflattering,” she said. “In pictures, they look like I don’t even know what. I just completely separate the two. Because I have such a terrible relationship with my body like you would not believe, so I just have to disassociate.”
She also admitted that she is perplexed as to why society is obsessed with bodies, whether their own or those of others. During a Calvin Klein campaign in 2019, the singer addressed the issue further, claiming that society’s obsession with bodies is the inspiration for her public image. In the video, she claims that the baggy clothes prevent “nobody can have an opinion because they haven’t seen what’s underneath.”
Her obsession with her body, in particular, had a significant influence on her style. She told Elle Magazine in 2019 that as a woman with a larger chest, she feels more harshly judged when she wears a top with cleavage. She recalled a time when someone photographed her in a tank top as she exited her tour bus, saying,”My boobs were trending on Twitter. … Every outlet wrote about my boobs.”
“I was born with f—ing boobs, bro. I was born with DNA that was going to give me big-a– boobs. I was recently FaceTiming a close friend of mine who’s a dude, and I was wearing a tank top. He was like, ‘Ugh, put a shirt on.’ And I said, ‘I have a shirt on,’” she told the outlet. “Someone with smaller boobs could wear a tank top, and I could put on that exact tank top and get slut-shamed because my boobs are big. That is stupid. It’s the same shirt.”
