"People have taken me more seriously because I dressed this way."
Billie Eilish opens up in a new interview with High Snobiety about her love life and the changes in her appearance over the past few years.
The 20-year-old singer, who is usually very private about her personal life, recently confirmed to Vanity Fair that she is in a relationship with The Neighborhood singer Jesse Rutherford and that she is "very excited" and "very happy".
On High Snobiety, Billie Eilish was a little more sparing about her love life, avoiding mentioning her partner of 31 years, while speaking more generally about the mind-bending concept of love. “It's hard for me to fall in love. It's a scary thing, love. It's really scary," he said.
For the most part, the interview focuses on the evolution of Billie Eilish's appearance over the past seven years in the public eye.
The singer, who is best known for baggy and unisex looks, admitted: "It shocks me when I meet people who don't care about clothes - what they wear and how they wear it."
In recent years, Billie Eilish has been getting into haute couture, turning heads at the 2022 Met Gala this year with her recycled Gucci dress, though she certainly has mixed feelings about the importance some in the entertainment industry place on external appearance.
"There's a performative nature to fashion week that really pisses me off, because you're saying, 'Please pay attention to the clothes,'" she said, noting that fashion is a "driving force" for her as well as a way to connect with the people.
“People saw me as this 15-year-old, a kid, who wore these things, looked like this, acted like this, said these things. I felt like I couldn't change. That's why I went so far to the other side,” she said of her initial looks.
"I was trying to prove, 'Hey, go drown, I can do whatever I want.' Now I can look really masculine if I want to, and really feminine if I want to, and it won't make headlines," she added.
All this trying out different styles was a fun game, but nothing more for Billie Eilish. "It's not like you wear one thing and that's your new style, you keep wearing a bunch of things," she said.
Billie Eilish has said she feels sexier when she dresses as a man, although her parallel experiment with going blonde last year didn't turn out as she had hoped. "When I was blonde, people treated me differently. People completely changed their behavior towards me,” he remarked.
While launching her new fragrance, 'Eilish No. 2,” the pop star feels she has earned the public's trust and can expand her empire into more ventures outside of music.
“I think people have taken me more seriously because I've had this more masculine way of dressing throughout my career. If I was more feminine and girly, people would respect me a lot less,” she said.
