Billie Eilish has grown up.

How do you know that?

Very easily.

A surefire sign that a female pop star has come of age is the public viewing and evaluation of her body.

What at least some media and commentators on social media do not dare to do with a sixteen-year-old is customary when she is 18 at the latest.

Johanna Dürrholz

Editor in the Society department at FAZ.NET

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    This is often because growing up is being marketed by young, successful women. If a pop star is no longer new on the market and has to prove herself through new music and new works, it is a pleasant side effect when the artist has turned 19 in the meantime and no longer feels like wearing pigtails and schoolgirl uniform (which yes , from a marketing point of view, is also not insignificant). The coming-of-age story, the entry into adolescence, has always been monetized in pop music.

    Britney Spears' cropped schoolgirl look was followed by an indecisive “I'm not a girl, not yet a woman” and then a very determined, rather sweaty and strangled “I'm a slave 4 U”. When Christina Aguilera no longer wanted to be a Djinni girl, she became "dirrty" with a bang, and Miley Cyrus not only danced ambiguously with strange giant stuffed animals, she also waved naked at a wrecking ball and lived her adulthood excessively (and without ever in Really crash). The list of young singers who have grown up to be effective in the media is long.

    Most of these image changes are precisely calculated, want an outcry, and the record companies want to market the sexuality of their stars at the same time.

    This applies particularly to women, although a previous boy group crush like Harry Styles has certainly gone through a change and now sometimes shows more skin than in his one-direction phase.  

    Calculated moment

    So now Billie Eilish. Has she bowed to the dictates of the record companies? The one who always managed to be the most beautiful, most unruly and profound seventeen-year-old in the world with poisonous green hair, black tears of ink and oversized Gucci full-body suits? At least she is now, at the age of nineteen, platinum blonde. And shows a lot more body than any oversized designer fumble would have ever guessed. For a spread in the British edition of “Vogue”, Eilish presented himself in a corset with suspenders or in over-the-knee latex boots. "Why should you wear a corset?" Asks Eilish in a Vogue conversation and gives the answer for himself: "My thing is: I can do whatever I want." Under an Instagram post that shows her in night-black see-through lingerie and tights,Eilish becomes even clearer: “I love these pictures and I loved the shoot. Do whatever you want to do, whenever you want to do it. Fuck everything else. " 

    Of course, Billie Eilish can do whatever she wants, she should, after all, she is an artist - and an exceptional artist at that. The photo series appears anyway at a calculated moment: Eilish released a second single from her upcoming album on Thursday. She had successfully hidden the look of the new album, i.e. blonde hair, over the past few months. The first picture of blonde Billie achieved exactly the desired effect in March on Instagram: Never before has a picture received a million likes so quickly, it took just six minutes. And the pictures from the Vogue shoot also went through the roof. The picture of Billie Eilish in a corset and trechcoat has now received more than 18.1 million likes and 221,000 comments.