
Even before she turned 17 in December, the singer Billie Eilish had accomplished nearly all of the modern prerequisites for pop stardom and then some: her homemade songs, written only with her older brother, had been streamed more than 1 billion times on digital platforms she’d played increasingly large sold-out concerts to delirious fans (and their patient parents) appeared with Ellen DeGeneres and Jimmy Fallon and collected some 15 million followers on Instagram.Īmong those legions, many had already started to adopt the musician’s striking visual aesthetic: performatively dead eyes (bored, at best), hair dyed in shades of electric blue and pale purple, an all-baggy anti-silhouette – a collective middle finger to the strictures of teen-pop sex appeal.
