“I got injured right after we made ‘Ocean Eyes’”—the song Eilish uploaded to SoundCloud in 2015 that, as anyone who’s vaguely followed her career knows, started it all—“so, music kind of replaced dancing,” she says. Years of subsequent lower body injuries, and just as many misdiagnoses, increased the alienation Eilish felt in her own skin before she discovered, through her movement coach, Kristina Cañizares, that she has a condition called hypermobility.
“Stuff that you and I could do that would help us,” Baird explains, bundled in a black parka in this tiny, cold room lined with guitars and speakers, “like, certain kinds of massage or chiropractors, could actually hurt her.”
“I felt like my body was gaslighting me for years,” Eilish says. “I had to go through a process of being like, My body is actually me. And it’s not out to get me.”
Billie wears this newfound self-acceptance lightly, projecting not so much the emo angst of her early career as a kind of childlike joy. “I love you!” she tells 17,000 screaming fans over and over—many of them young women who see themselves in Eilish—at the first of her sold-out end-of-year performances in Los Angeles. It so happens that this mood shift comes as the seven-time Grammy winner has set her sights forward—on the greater goal of saving the planet.
“I’ve spent all of my effort trying not to be in people’s faces about it,” she says, her speaking voice assertive and unwavering. “Because people don’t respond well to that. It makes the causes that you believe in look bad, because you’re, like, annoying the shit out of everybody.” But she has tried to educate people. During 2022’s Happier Than Ever world tour, Eilish set up Eco-Villages at her concert venues in partnership with Reverb, a nonprofit that has “greened” the tours of other acts and artists like Maroon 5 and Harry Styles. Inside those spaces, fans could fill their water bottles for free, register to vote, and learn about environmental nonprofits, with an emphasis on BIPOC- and women-led organizations. “I’m still not shoving information down people’s throats,” she says. “I’m more like, I’m not going to tell you what to do. I’m just going to tell you why I do this.” She pauses, then offers a staccato laugh. “But you’re also a bad person if you don’t do it.”
Eilish hasn’t limited her commitment to the environment to her live shows. She famously secured a guarantee from Oscar de la Renta’s creative directors, Fernando Garcia and Laura Kim, to stop selling fur when she wore their design, a voluminous tulle Old Hollywood gown with a 15-foot train, to her first Met Gala in 2021, which she co-chaired with fellow Gen Z stars Timothée Chalamet, Naomi Osaka, and Amanda Gorman. “What was most inspiring to me from the creative side was to see this 19-year-old powerhouse look us in the eye and say, ‘I want to do something that scares me,’” Garcia recalls, referring to Eilish’s decision to wear a dress with pronounced corseting. “She inspired me to think outside the box and do things that scare me, too, because it usually means we’ll grow from it.” To last year’s Met Gala, Eilish wore upcycled Gucci, with whom she collaborated to make a limited edition of Happier Than Ever out of vinyl scraps from the original pressing, packaged in a box designed by former creative director Alessandro Michele.
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