Since winning her second Oscar for the Barbie song early in 2024, Billie Eilish’s year has only gotten bigger with the release of her third studio album, Hit Me Hard And Soft, which she is now touring. As she celebrates her latest chart-topping album on the road, the singer reflected on her career thus far. And, she has some new insights about what was going on when she dyed her hair blonde and changed her whole look for her 2021 album, Happier Than Ever.
Although she’s just 22, Billie Eilish has already been in the music industry for over a decade, and she has learned a lot about herself along the way. It’s not easy to literally grow up in front of the world, and as the singer recently talked about, experimenting with her sense of self publicly was necessary to figuring herself out. As she shared about the time during an interview with Vanity Fair:
I decided I wanted to go blonde, then I decided that I remembered that I was a girl, and I was like ‘Wait, I want to be other things, not just this one thing that I’ve been looked at as for all these years.' I remember ordering a skirt off of Amazon. I didn’t have a skirt, and I was like ‘I gotta wear a skirt.'
Prior to Happier Than Ever, Billie Eilish became widely known for challenging norms for women’s fashion (especially in the pop star space), and wearing baggy, often masculine clothing. So after she gained massive fame for her first record When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, which earned her all sorts of awards, she felt like she needed to explore her identity outside of public perception. As she continued:
Dude, I was 18, I was trying to figure it out. I’d been told I was one thing for many years and I believed it. Which was definitely a lot, but I felt like I needed to do it. I’m an extreme person, like I need to have extreme sensation, and I think that was my way of expressing myself in the way that I knew how, which was everything, all at once.
Eilish completely shocked fans in March 2021 when she revealed a platinum blonde hairstyle that would become a centerpiece for her second album’s creative direction. The singer traded the horror aesthetics of her first album for Old Hollywood flair for Happier Than Ever, which even led her to become a blonde cartoon character for her Hollywood Bowl special (available to stream with a Disney+ subscription).
While promoting the album, Eilish also experimented with more feminine clothing, often wearing mini skirts and breaking the internet by rocking corsets for Vogue. As she spoke in the new interview, she now looks back at the era as “expressing” herself in an “extreme” way that she needed to do at the time. It certainly allowed her to break out of the box the public had placed her in prior. She also said this:
The music was a completely different process than the reinventing of the look. Coming off of those crazy couple years, I'd won those Grammys that year, and my shit did not stink. I don't know, I just felt good.
Billie Eilish said the album was made with “a little too much confidence” and she still loves it, even if she doesn’t place it in as high of a regard as her other two works. You can check out Eilish’s latest career retrospective in the video from Vanity Fair below:
Eilish has since shared that going blonde didn’t make her feel sexy “for one second” and she feels more herself when she dresses masculine. Of course, such is the case with all of us, what makes Billie Eilish feel like herself, feminine, masculine, blonde, brunette, and so forth is subject to change, and we cannot wait to see what’s to come in all future eras of her career.
