“Though you’ve never seen my body, you still judge it and judge me for it.”

Billie Eilish’s When We All Fall Asleep 2020 World Tour finally kicked off in Orlando, Fl. last night, where she debuted a video interlude featuring a spoken word verse addressing her body image in the public eye. Billie’s body has been a topic of much discussion given her signature wardrobe of baggy, full-body clothes, and as well as the fact that she was a minor until December 2019.

In the short video, Billie is filmed in slow-motion shedding layers of clothing. Her voice-over shares some thoughts about growing up female in the public eye with the lines of text displayed on screens:

If I wear what is comfortable?

I am not a woman

If I shed the layers

I’m a slut

Though you’ve never seen my body

You still judge it

And judge me for it

The interlude tackles the dichotomy of the public eye, where she is judged no matter what she chooses to do. Ultimately, she concludes that their judgment is beyond her control, and decides to live for no one else’s standards or opinions but her own:

Who decides what makes me?

What that means

Is my value based on your perception?

Or is your opinion of me

Not my responsibility?

Billie’s streetwear-art aesthetic has become apart of her persona almost as much as songs. Her choice to wear baggy, unflattering clothing was part of a deliberate strategy to draw attention away from her body, as she shared in Calvin Klein’s 2019 #MyCalvins campaign:

That’s why I wear big baggy clothes. Nobody can have an opinion because they haven’t seen what’s underneath. Nobody can be like, ‘she’s slim-thick,’ ‘she’s not slim-thick,’ ‘she’s got a flat ass,’ ‘she’s got a fat ass.’ No one can say any of that because they don’t know.

In her 2019 Elle interview, she did explain that once she turned 18, there was the possibility that she would explore her sexuality more overtly.

I’m gonna be a woman. I wanna show my body. What if I wanna make a video where I wanna look desirable?

There have been recent hints of this transformation, but Billie asserts in her speech that she is only empowered by revealing what she wants to reveal on her terms alone.

Read all the words to Billie Eilish’s “About My Body” on Genius now.