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Billie Eilish with new photos and new hair color: her image, her rules

2021-05-03T15:01:43.990Z


So far, the singer Billie Eilish has covered her body so as not to be controlled by others - now she shows herself in a photo shoot as a blonde vamp. Why this is an act of liberation.


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Pop star Billie Eilish

Photo: billieeilish / Instagram

Billie Eilish realized early on that she couldn't do it "right".

In a short film that she released in spring 2020, the then 18-year-old reflected on her role as a global pop idol and her image in the media: “If I wear something comfortable, I'm not a woman.

If I strip the layers off, I'll be a bitch

Although you have never seen my body, you judge it and thus me too.

Why? ”She asked.

Like no other pop artist in recent times, Eilish, a successful singer from California, is a role model for so-called

body positivity,

i.e. the acceptance of one's own body dimensions and supposed flaws. It is also a matter of making oneself independent of common beauty

norms

conveyed by the media, which often follow the sexualizing male gaze, the

male gaze

.

Unlike, for example, the black singer Lizzo, who shows her voluminous body completely bared on Instagram, Eilish has so far wrapped herself in loose leisure clothes. Her baggy look became a trademark along with her neon green and black hairstyle; it was a refusal to mainstream sexualization of her physical appearance, as has been customary for decades, especially among female entertainment stars. But that's over now.

At least that's what you might think if you see the photos Eilish used for an interview in the June issue of British Vogue: Eilish shows more skin than ever before, wears figure-hugging bustiers, a corset, latex Gloves and lingerie. With her recently blond hair, which she revealed a month ago, she looks like a "bombshell" from old Hollywood times, a glamor model who serves man's dreams like Marilyn Monroe once did. However, a much more modern and self-determined variant.

Because unlike the Hollywood sex symbols of yore, Eilish chose the type of new staging herself.

The criticism that was immediately voiced on the Internet that it was selling itself to industry and submitting to its rules therefore came to nothing - and misunderstood the act of liberation that these images symbolize.

In an interview with Vogue, Eilish explains what her image change is all about and what it means for her.

Dissatisfaction with her body was the trigger for the depression she sang about in the songs on her debut album.

The loose clothing that she wore in public, especially when she was still a minor at the time, was a means for her to hide from view.

But Eilish's neutralization of his own body through demonstrative refusal still recognized the judgment of others. Only in these new photos is the step towards independence, freeing oneself from the responsibility of how and by whom their way of presenting themselves is received and instrumentalized.

Eilish consistently accuses body positivity advocates of hypocrisy if she is no longer a role model for them due to her body-focused openness: "Don't

make

me

a role model just because you feel turned on by me now," she says . Her choice to dress neutrally, if not modestly, was not a statement against other female pop stars who wrapped themselves in sparse clothes. Showing your body and skin or not, Eilish says, shouldn't affect how much respect you are shown.

This is of course nothing new in modern feminism, and pop artists from Madonna to Rihanna and Beyoncé to Ariana Grande have been practicing this kind of self-empowerment for a long time. It is about controlling one's own image according to self-determined rules, depending on what one's own feeling is dictating: Those who feel sexy and comfortable in their own body should also be able to show that without being judged or degraded to an object of pleasure.

It's great when Billie Eilish can get rid of the inhibitions and insecurities of her teenage years and fearlessly present herself as she pleases. The sensation of these "Vogue" photos is not the bare skin it shows or the shape of your body that it now reveals. The real sensation - and sexyness - lies in her defiant, emancipatory gaze at these images that she controls.

Source: spiegel

All life articles on 2021-05-03

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