Billie Eilish Feels ‘The Most Powerful When I Feel Masculine’
Billie Eilish feels the “most powerful” when she feels “masculine.” The singer discussed this in a candid interview for BBC 100 Women in Conversation. Speaking about her British Vogue cover photo from June last year, the 20-year-old shocked fans when she wore a corset. The “Bad Guy” singer was always photographed in baggy clothes before that. At the time, she wrote, “i love these pictures and i loved doing this shoot. do whatever you want whenever you want. f— everything else.”
Speaking to BBC now, the star explains how she feels comfortable expressing “a balance of both” sides of herself. Still, she said, “I feel the most powerful when I feel masculine.” She added, “I also can find power in femininity, it’s kind of a balance of both.” When asked what she meant by “masculine,” Eilish replied, “I don’t know — depending on how I walk and stand and my clothes and my face – and my jewelry and my fingers, just everything that I am day to day. I like to feel more masculine than feminine, it just makes me feel better.”
Eilish said that this was something she had found hard to understand when she was younger. “I struggled with [preferring to feel masculine] for a long time because I wanted to feel feminine and like it. I just didn’t really,” she said. “But then it’s finding moments where you can have that and it still feels good. Like right now I’m wearing a tighter shirt and I’m wearing a more low-cut shirt.” She added, “The older me would have been like ‘Eurgh! ‘Please don’t!’ but I like it now and it’s just the balance of the two.”
The singer also discussed growing up in the public eye, calling the experience “bruising.” Eilish admitted to having “severe imposter syndrome.” There was a turning point in which the young star felt like she started to earn the trust of the public adding, “As soon as people started to trust me, being female and all, and especially being a very young female and especially in this industry it’s very hard to make people believe in you. It was a very satisfying moment when I realized that people actually wanted to hear what I had to say, or believed in what I had to say — and when I finally had control it was a really good moment.”
