Grammy award-winning musical sensation Billie Eilish kicked off the first leg of her Where Do We Go? tour in Miami on Monday.
The 18-year-old songstress spoke up about body shaming and insecurities in a powerful video, where she removed her clothing down to her underwear.
“Do you really know me?” Eilish said in the video. “You have opinions about my opinions, about my music, about my clothes, about my body. Some people hate what I wear; some people praise it. Some people use it to shame others; some people use it to shame me.”
She went on to call out the hypocrisies and judgements around her appearance. “Would you like me to be smaller? Weaker? Softer? Taller? Would you like me to be quiet? Do my shoulders provoke you? Does my chest? Am I my stomach? My hips? The body I was born with, is it not what you wanted? If I wear what is comfortable, I am not a woman,” she said.
She finished the speech with a poignant message. “We decide who they are. We decide what they’re worth. “If I wear more, if I wear less, who decides what that makes me? What that means? Is my value based only on your perception? Or is your opinion of me not my responsibility?”
Known for her baggy, streetwear style, the young singer has previously spoken about judgement and criticisms she’s experienced being in the spotlight. “I never want the world to know everything about me,” she said in a 2018 Calvin Klein campaign. “I mean, that’s why I wear big, baggy clothes—nobody can have an opinion because they haven’t seen what’s underneath, you know?”
In an interview for V Magazine last year, Eilish spoke to Pharrel Williams about the pressure she feels from others and her frustrations about the focus on her choice of clothing. “I wear what I want to wear. But of course, everyone sees it as, ‘She’s saying no to being sexualized,'” she said to Williams. “[Even] from my parents, [the] positive [comments] about how I dress have this slut-shaming element. Like, ‘I am so glad that you are dressing like a boy, so that other girls can dress like boys, so that they aren’t sluts.’ That’s basically what it sounds like to me. And I can’t [overstate how] strongly I do not appreciate that, at all.”
