THRILLING BILLIE GETS GEN Z GIRLS INTO A TIZZ
MILA Docheva faced down the camera, her contours camouflaged by an outsize hoodie raucously inscribed with neon graffiti. Her turnout, which she posted on Instagram, was an homage to her idol, pop star Billie Eilish.
“When I dress like Billie, I feel just a little bit closer to her,” Mila, 14, said through a translator in an email (she lives in Silistra, a town in north-eastern Bulgaria). “I’m not a girlie girl. I am curvy, and I ride a skateboard. Feeling comfortable in my skin is important to me. Billie’s style gives me the courage to do that.”
Swarms of girls and young women ranging in age from under 10 to their early 20s are echoing those sentiments. They are smitten with Eilish, who took home an armful of Grammys last week, remodelling themselves in her image, posting gaudy makeovers on Instagram and other social platforms, from places as far-flung as Tbilisi and Nashville.
Eilish’s following has swelled since her first single, Ocean Eyes, went viral on SoundCloud five years ago. Her style clout has grown alongside it, on infectious display on Instagram, where she has millions of followers. It recalls the kind of fashion fervour rarely seen since Madonna’s early videos incited throngs of very young fans to shimmy their frames into merry widows and pile on stacks of bangles and cataracts of chains.
The enthusiasm of Eilish’s devotees denotes a striking turnabout, a new generation’s rejection of the flirty babe aesthetic embodied by contemporary idols like Ariana Grande in favour of something more crazily improvised and less strenuously sexual.
At 18, Eilish, who often goes without make-up, favours a pastiche of outsize 1980s and ’90s hip-hop and skater looks.
“Her look is not about vanity,” said Lucie Greene, a trend forecaster and brand strategist. “She is flipping the idea of beauty to something surreal, something influenced by gaming and the cyber culture.”
“These are not the filtered images of millennials,” Greene said.
Since arriving on the pop scene, Eilish has underplayed, and even wilfully sabotaged, the vampiness that has long been deemed a prerequisite to stardom. To some she is the anti-Ariana, a tomboyish naïf.
Her look, paradoxically standoffish and in your face, is punctuated by shocks of blue or green hair, riotously patterned tops and tracksuits, and thorny punk and goth references. It is, in Mila’s phrase, “an act of rebellion”, as provocative as it is protective.
“She has an armour that’s bright and loud,” said Rachel Gilman, a fashion stylist whose clients have included Bloomingdale’s and Adidas. “It’s dye your roots green and wear the baggiest clothes in the room. It’s good for girls to see that they can succeed without wearing a push-up bra if that isn’t their vibe.”
The star’s advent, some say, could not have been more timely. “It feels fair to describe Eilish’s aesthetic as both an antidote to and a queering of the hyper-feminised pop-star archetype,” Amanda Petrusich wrote in The New Yorker last year. Her style resonates, Petrusich said, “in a cultural moment when we are all trying very hard to sort out real people from the ones who are merely savvy and ambitious enough to know the right way to curate and present an authentic-seeming vibe”.
Eilish’s apparent realness has inevitably snared the attention of marketers as well. Her appearance last spring in the “I Speak My Truth in #MyCalvins” ad campaign contrasted sharply with previous Calvin Klein campaigns modelled by scantily clad boys and girls.
In December H&M sought to cash in on the impact of her socially conscious, street-inflected message, releasing a line of sustainably produced sweatshirts, supersize hoodies, bucket hats and beanies.
Eilish presents as audacious and spontaneous, if a bit candied at times.
“She dresses like a Disney princess, but she doesn’t sound like one,” said Giana, a 10-year-old social media personality from Dallas with a shock of emerald-tone hair and an Instagram following of her own. To Giana, who goes by her first name only and dresses in Eilish-inspired clashing plaids and colours, Eilish is the mistress of brash self-invention.
“She knows you can make a look fearless,” Giana said, “and she makes me feel it too.”
It may jolt her to learn that Eilish once scorned wannabes, venting that resentment in her lyrics. “Copycat trying to cop my manner, Watch your back when you can’t watch mine,” she taunts in Copycat, released in 2017.
She has certainly vaunted her originality. “I could easily just be like, you know what, you’re going to pick out my clothes, someone else will come up with my video treatments, someone else will direct them and I won’t have anything to do with them,” she said in a profile in The New York Times last year.
“But I’m not that kind of person and I’m not that kind of artist,” she said.
She seems happy enough, all the same, to exploit an ever-widening fascination with her fashion bravura, entering into partnerships with Freak City, an online platform based in Los Angeles, and with youth-oriented stores like Urban Outfitters and Hot Topic. She has introduced a children’s line on Blohsh, the Billie Eilish online store that sells vinyl albums and CDs, along with fleece blankets, socks and sweatshirts with spray-painted logos.
Some fans may chafe to discover that she has worked since she was 14 with Samantha Burkhart, a highpowered stylist whose clients include Katy Perry, Christina Aguilera and Mark Ronson.