"... in favor of something more crazily improvised and less strenuously sexual. At 18, [Billie] Eilish, who often goes without makeup, favors a pastiche of outsize 1980s and ’90s hip-hop and skater looks. That look speaks assertively to a Gen Z crowd chary of artifice and aggressive displays of sensuality. 'Her look is not about vanity,' said Lucie Greene, a trend forecaster and brand strategist. 'She is flipping the idea of beauty to something surreal, something influenced by gaming and the cyberculture. These are not the filtered images of millennials'....Her style resonates, [Amanda Petrusich wrote in The New Yorker], 'in a cultural moment when we are all trying very hard to sort out real people from the ones who are merely savvy and ambitious enough to know the right way to curate and present an authentic-seeming vibe.'"
From "Billie Eilish: Gen Z’s Outrageous Fashion Role Model/The Grammy-winning artist is reinventing conventional notions of femininity" by Ruth La Ferla (NYT).
I'm glad these kids today are "chary of artifice and aggressive displays of sensuality" (as the NYT puts it).
I like seeing Generation Z rise up and challenge the millennials. Time for millennials to see younger people not enjoying them. It's one thing to feel the older generation's criticism, quite another to have the criticism coming from the new people.
ADDED: "I've never been to school. I grew up homeschooled, stayed homeschooled, never was not homeschooled," said Billie Eilish, quoted in Reason, in "Sibling Grammy Winners Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell Praise Homeschooling."
१०५ टिप्पण्या:
This article has been rerun with minor changes several thousand times since the 60s.
Each time, it's supposed to be shocking and trendy.
'She is flipping the idea of beauty to something surreal, something influenced by gaming and the cyberculture.
I wish I knew the onomatopoeia for sloppy diarrhea noises, so I could more carefully describe what this schlock is. She is an 18 year old girl who is dressing in what she thinks looks cool.
Meh. The only rational reaction to any NYT piece declaring that something is "in" is to assume that it's based on three people the author knows in Brooklyn, and has absolutely no bearing on the country at large. (That is, in those cases where the default assumption isn't that the piece is designed to help the Democratic Party.)
New York Times has spotted over 500 of the last three big trends...
I wish Ozzy would bite the head off another bat in front of this "trend forecaster" paid to write this pretentious idiocy.
As they say on Project Runway: one day you’re in, and the next day you’re out.
Though perhaps not in fashion, surprisingly Eilish’s music has strong crossover appeal to many in older demographics.
She's not reinventing anything. She's just following a path that we are already on moving moving away from beauty and to ugliness.
It could be combined with coronavirus somehow, for a real style statement. Sick and proud or something.
My granddaughters love to play dress up. It’s charming and fun.
We’re in the Disney princess stage.
It's old fashioned to display tits and ass. Porn everywhere means everybody knows about it already. The attraction now is that they're under there somewhere.
"Shouting Thomas said...
My granddaughters love to play dress up. It’s charming and fun.
We’re in the Disney princess stage."
We're?
Maybe she has psoriasis or something.
Heartbreaking, Bob
I do like her music.
I agree with ST that this "trend" is a rerun. And it isn't as if Billie Eilish just doesn't care about looks- she works quite hard at an image. Green hair, long green nails, green clothes.....or another color another day. Is that not makeup?
As someone who was a teenager in the ‘90s, I really think my generation has the lock on pretty young people making themselves as ugly as possible, and calling it fashion.
I can picture Billie reading the article and saying "Duh" after just about any sentence.
...
You know ... like in the song ... which I heard for the first time last week ...
...
Duh
On the other hand, the ratings for the Grammies are dropping like a rock. It’s like actresses who don’t want to put out for the producers. What kind of business was it that you wanted to be in, and can it make any money?
I'm glad these kids today are "chary of artifice and aggressive displays of sensuality" (as the NYT puts it).
And I'll be overjoyed if kids today know what "chary of artifice" means.
I googled "Bad Man" and the #1 result was her music video "Bad Guy." That's some pull.
If you think writing fashion PR boilerplate is dreary, try writing music biz PR boilerplate. I did it!
X_New_Star explodes out of X_Town with an earthy passionate sound reminiscent of X_Old_Star. Formerly of X_Band and Y_Band, X_New_Star combines elements of...
You get the idea.
@Curious George. The closet is currently full up. Until Howard comes out, there’s no room for me.
in a cultural moment when we are all trying very hard to sort out real people from the ones who are merely savvy and ambitious enough to know the right way to curate and present an authentic-seeming vibe.'
Why? The people under discussion are singers, correct? Why prefer unsavvy and unambitious singers? What's the point?
I agree with the above - we have seen all this before.
A problem if age I suppose, we have been through many cycles and can't perceive novelty.
My problem with this girl, as with so many before her, is that she apparently can't smile.
chary of artifice
Some men dreamed about taking a girl's chary of artifice.
Some were happy waiting for when it was no longer an issue.
“cherry of artifice” was a theme in Shibumi, BTW.
I like Billie Eilish. Granted, I've only heard the one song and watched the video, but it was great. "Are you not entertained?"
Yes, I are and thanks to Althouse, I feel like I've got my finger on the pulse.
The point is that art is the most cut throat competitive industry known to man. If you can manage to get past your petty jealousy and envy of the winners, you will observe that the top artists are multi-talented, hard working, intelligent and fiercely ambitious. If you really believe in the free market capitalist American dream, you might be able to see that.
I am not entertained.
Or to paraphrase Howard:
You people need to man up and stop being pencil dick cowards! Real men can take a punch!
When are you going to stop beating up on the coloreds?
How was the steam room at the Y last night, Howie?
I'm waiting for you to break out the Biggus Dickus act. Stay with what you know.
I am not entertained.
But you do have your finger on the pulse.
Think of it like being a nurse assistant in the Coronavirus quarantine area.
Envy of the winners?
Howard, the most important part of "art" is the audience, not the artists.
The audience is whimsical. Success is largely random.
And pretty girls need to smile.
In the feminist era, the standard boilerplate music PR for a female singer has been:
X_Pop_Star breaks barriers while courageously advancing the cause of X_Whatever!
Her fashion statement announces a new femininity that is sexy and daring, but has absolutely nothing to do with turning men on.
No, no... absolutely nothing! She's doing it entirely for herself! Well, maybe for the lesbians...
Pro Tip:
Every twenty years or so, Black tShirts and Converse All-Stars rise up from obscurity, and are popular, AGAIN; for a while
50's Greasers
70's Punk
90's Grunge
2020 The delicious Ms. Eilish
not to mention Goths, Geeks and Freaks
Her style resonates, [Amanda Petrusich wrote in The New Yorker], 'in a cultural moment when we are all trying very hard to sort out real people from the ones who are merely savvy and ambitious enough to know the right way to curate and present an authentic-seeming vibe.'"
Ugh. "Real people." Somebody failed her postmodernism course.
rhhardin said...
It could be combined with coronavirus somehow, for a real style statement. Sick and proud or something.
She looks sick. Althouse, this is more if you liking what is bad. She looks like a bum. A bum with coronavirus. A look for radio, where she has a reasonably sweet voice, though I cannot commend her diction.
Garbage Howie blathered...
If you really believe in the free market capitalist American dream, you might be able to see that.
Why? You don't.
As I wanted to say on the other thread before boredom overtook me, your bullying act is like a fat kid who has discovered that with a magnifying glass, you can burn ants alive. You may invent justifications and rationalizations for your actions but it's all bullshit, you just like to inflict pain.
Blah blah elites, don't you know it's more important to be good than to be "smart?" You typify the leftist notion that the "dumb" are the "smart's" lawful prey.
And who ever told you you were smart? You were a fricking Marine!
Didn't anyone ever write about Mozart's fashion sense? Irving Berlin had some early success as a songwriter. I believe he might have influenced the way other songwriters wrote songs, but I don't think the larger public looked to him for guidance on the proper way to live......I wonder if musical artists had more room to maneuver in the pre-Dylan era. It's hard enough to write a catchy tune and deliver it in an appealing way without also having to forge the uncreated conscience of your generation. It's hard to set that to music.
As ST notes, Eilish is nothing new. And I disagree about the makeup thing. But Meghan Trainor didn't fit the Grande stereotype either.
I don't think Eilish is that good. She certainly is being promoted heavily and this article seems like another effort on promotion. However, what I like about her break out hit isn't the singing. I enjoy the music. The singing is weak, like a person lacking confidence, and shows no range. I don't like Lizzo either, but she at least sounds confident and oddly has shown range.
And who ever told you you were smart? You were a fricking Marine!
I'm beginning to get a kick out of Howard and his Biggus Dickus act. He's sort of like R. Lee Emery in Full Metal Jacket.
His first advice to me was that I should have spent my youth charging into machine gun fire, instead of staying home to screw the girls. Screwing the girls is for fags. Real men take a hail of 50 caliber bullets!
His posts are inadvertently hilarious.
More Howard! More Howard!
The enthusiasm of Ms. Eilish’s devotees denotes a striking turnabout, a new generation’s rejection of the flirty babe aesthetic embodied by contemporary idols like Ariana Grande... in favor of something more crazily improvised and less strenuously sexual.
Oh, how we've yearned for a return to the salad days of Averil Lavigne and Lorde!
I want a return to the days of Edith Piaf.
She could sing, and smile.
Nichevo: All humor is about inflicting pain because life is fundamentally suffering. Thomas is right, I'm telling you to grow a pair.
'Her look is not about vanity,' said Lucie Greene, a trend forecaster and brand strategist. 'She is flipping the idea of beauty to something surreal...
If what she's trying to do involves assigning the term "beauty" to herself, how is it not about vanity?
Yay Howard!
More Howard! More Biggus Dickus!
I just can't get enough of that there stuff!
When are you fucking faggots gonna grow a pair? Huh?
“ I don't like Lizzo either, but she at least sounds confident and oddly has shown range.”
I wonder what she could run the 40 in?
I listen to streaming music at work. Amazon was touting a playlist with the Grammy nominees the other day, so I listened to a Billie Eilish song to see what all the fuss was about, and found that it wasn't my cup of tea. Went to her album and briefly sampled a few other songs to see if I liked any of them better. Not my thing at all. I guess other people like her, so good luck to her in her career.
Maybe she just suffered in comparison after I'd been listening to a few She & Him albums. Zooey Deschanel can sing.
Going without makeup? What man doesn’t like a woman who looks good enough that she doesn’t need makeup?
The old, "If you can fake sincerity you've got it made," gambit.
There's always a new audience that's not too chary for that.
Buwaya Puti: your caliphate hatred of art and artists is showing. The best most successful artists create for themselves. It's called leadership. You are programmed to be a follower and to protect your self esteem, you Bond with your fellow sheep.
"never was not homeschooled,"
Double negative.
Well, I am (with documentation to prove it) a sayyid, a descendant of the Prophet.
Granted it does not make me a would-be Caliph. But even in the days of the Caliphs it was the audience that made the artist, often the Caliph himself of course, as he liked what he liked.
Even monarchs are led by the crowd however. The Caliph usually wanted to like what his court liked, in order to be well thought of. Even a Caliph was just a man.
Shouting Thomas: " My granddaughters love to play dress up. It’s charming and fun.
We’re in the Disney princess stage.
We? This is a fascinating mental image. Pictures please. [Shouting Thomas in a tiara and ice blue fluffy gown, angrily waving a magic wand]
:-D
Kids love dress up. My Granddaughter is past Disney Princess and is now a super heroine of some kind. Changes daily. Wonder Woman. Spider Girl...stole her brothers old outfit.
Dress up is fun. We did it in the 60's with all the tie dyed outfits, beads, fake Indian garb(both dot and feather).
Let Billie Ellish have her fun. It is harmless as long as we don't take her seriously.
The Madonna route was getting stale evidently. Is cuddly the new thing for female artists? In no way am I a reporter on modern trends, but she seems a strange mix of prepubescent, Jr high, and budding maturity. Definitely Laslo material.
There are three groups of women in pop-music: 1. Those like Eilish who are extremely attractive without using any make-up or sexy clothing, and who therefore can adopt the "natural look" brand; 2. Those like Britney Spears (google Britney Spears without makeup) who are pretty plain, but who polish up nicely with careful makeup and sexy clothing; 3. Those like Mama Cass for whom makeup and sexy clothing don't make much difference (equally attractive or unattractive with or without artifice). I doubt if Eilish is going to be a role model for many young women, except those who would fall into category 1 if they were pop-music stars.
gilbar said...
Pro Tip:
Every twenty years or so, Black tShirts and Converse All-Stars rise up from obscurity, and are popular, AGAIN; for a while
50's Greasers
70's Punk
90's Grunge
2020 The delicious Ms. Eilish
1/29/20, 7:44 AM
I was thinking of the "natural look" of the early '70's. Think of Carole King on the album cover of "Tapestry." Long, frizzy hair parted in the middle, no makeup, jeans. Earth shoes, desert boots, macrame purses. Teen magazines were filled with "natural" beauty treatments that involved putting the contents of your refrigerator on your face: egg whites, avocados, cucumber slices.
And yeah, grunge was more of the same. I remember seeing a picture of a young Brad Pitt heading out for a night on the town sporting long greasy looking hair and an ugly snot-green sweater with a big hole in it. That was considered authentic too. It made me long for the days of Bogart and Becall.
"This article has been rerun with minor changes several thousand times since the 60s"
Good God, yes. Spew, rinse, repeat. Funny that growing older makes you both more jaded and more compassionate. It's really nerve-wracking.
Not everybody loved her.
She was only the winner by an Eilish.
The photo isn't quite representative. In a lot of pictures she looks sullen, bored and a little angry, and sometimes a little like Emily Blunt. But there's variety in the pictures. She's even smiling in some of them. And there are a lot of pictures.
Look for her to be a big success, like Avril Lavigne. And then for people to say that she's lousy and a sellout and a phony, like Avril Lavigne.
I'd rather listen to Kate Bush, or Liz Frasier, or Lisa Gerrard.
I wonder if we'll end up with quite a few homeschooled artists (and everything else) in the coming years.
You know what lasts? Maybe longer than a generation?
Good songwriting, natural talent and a good voice. Dedication to craft. Styles and tastes vary.
If you like or love something, there’s a natural instinct to compete, contribute and conserve. You don’t worry about the rest. You’re grateful to be a part of something and to help talent get where it’s going. Give and take. Run dry and fill up.
This also helps keep you young at heart, open to new experiences and people, and away from the desperate losers who take pop social science and make it something it isn’t, for example.
There are always people who must be right because they can’t be anything else. There are always shouting busybodies who want to mind your business because theirs isn’t worth minding.
Try not to be one of them as much as possible.
Meh! Wait until she has a good 2 or 3 year career lull (if she lasts that long), she'll be "reinvented" and show up as a bigger clothes horse than Taylor Swift.
“Every twenty years or so, Black tShirts and Converse All-Stars rise up from obscurity, and are popular, AGAIN; for a while”
What was weird this last Christmas was that I gave shoes to both my 60 year old brother, who got a new pair of black on black Converse High Tops (his “dress” shoes), and 15 and 17 year old grandsons who got Vans gift cards. And then we gave those two boys underwear for their birthdays this month. $100 each in underwear, picked out with their mother and grandmother (I was there to pay for everything).
“But you do have your finger on the pulse.“
Wrong, Bob.
I gotta rocket in my pocket and a finger in the socket.
Blogger Howard said...
Nichevo: All humor is about inflicting pain because life is fundamentally suffering. Thomas is right, I'm telling you to grow a pair.
"Ain'tcha got no sensayuma?" Gosh, I've never heard that from a sadist before. It's a revelation, I tells ya!
Actually I was always a good size and never did get bullied much, 'cept for one kid who sang to me in high school until I broke his T-square. I was more the guy to step in front of people like you.
As for my pair, it's entirely beyond reproach, but you are welcome to perform a taste test. Or just ask your womenfolk.
Funny thing is you're probably OK IRL. The fakery is the worst part of you. In a friendly way, Howie, this is not living your best life.
“I’d rather listen to Kate Bush, or Liz Frasier, or Lisa Gerrard.”
I could listen to the late Valerie Carter’s voice all day and all of the night.
And I ain’t lyin’... https://youtu.be/oOv0uQPtWGk
A lot of Eilish's sound is the work of her older brother, Finneas O'Connell, who was a cast member on Glee and had already brought in a professional A&R company, a publicist, and a stylist to help craft her image when she was 14 years old. So it seems like she is "merely savvy and ambitious enough to know the right way to curate and present an authentic-seeming vibe."
I really love the Sandy Denny era of Fairport Convention. Beautiful voice. Sad, tragic short life.
You ought to add this too AA, the Hot Ones episode with Ms. Eilish. If you aren't up to speed on Hot Ones, check it out. The host Sean Evans is a great interviewer, and asking celebs questions with the guard down from eating super hot chicken wings is pure genius.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDr4ITrp7YI&t=226s
I could listen to the late Valerie Carter’s voice all day and all of the night.
She sang a cover of The Five Staristep's IOoh Child that was featured as the end credits song to the 1979 film Over the Edge, Matt Dillon's debut film. As Jackson Browne sang, "That Girl Could Sing."
If you're 27 years old and literally know nothing, everything looks new and exciting to you.
Yeah, well all that being said Miss Grande is sick hot.
Chary of artifice?
Lolol
Gucci is back for a reason. These kids want lux.
Some Canadian company makes goose down coats and sells them for high 3 and low 4 figures. I wear fur. I get compliments from 20-somethings on my coat.
This sounds like a loudmouth 60s boomer vs. silent generation clash in the making.
“Zooey Deschanel can sing.”
We get into periodic arguments whether she, or her older sister Emily, are better looking. My vote is for Zooey, because she has a cute, sparkling, personality, whenever I have seen her acting. My partner, a former model, prefers Emily, because she thinks that she has better better chin and mouth than her younger sister. Then things go downhill, after my inevitable comment that women are so catty, always checking out and evaluating the looks of other women, much more than guys do. I should add that she thinks that my features are fairly muddy, and are dominated by my large head and long Welsh face, in comparison to her perfect (of course) classical French features. My response is typically that only the French think that French features are superior to all others. This would come up whenever we say one of them on TV, which is not as often any more after Emily’s “Bones” series ended. I won because we see or hear Zooey more often anymore.
I'm in my late 60s. I listened to a couple of her songs after hearing about her Grammy wins.
She's different, talented, interesting. I think she may have staying power. But what do I know?
Bruce Hayden said...
We get into periodic arguments whether she, or her older sister Emily, are better looking.
Zooey by a mile. She's got much more of a 'girl next door' air about her. Her sister looks like an ice queen.
On the topic of female vocalists, Susan Christie's album Paint a Lady is a great little one-off that almost never saw the light of day. Wonderful arrangements and a great cover of Ghost Riders in the Sky. Other than this collection Christie had only been known for a novelty song called "I Love Onions."
Round and round, from one real and perceived extreme to another. Progress.
All that money spent on acne busters and she wants to bring acne back.
buwaya: "And pretty girls need to smile."
Joan Jett never smiled....at least not a real smile. Perhaps an "ironic" smile, but that's it.
I'm still trying to figure out how she got hold of Hillary's "sparkly" pajamas for her Grammy's performance.
I love a lot of Eilish's songs, and there isn't all that much being produced today that I actually like. Most music stars of the day produce nothing that I like, or, at most, one song that I like.
Apparently Eilish suffers from Tourettes Syndrome, but it clearly hasn't held her back.
Bob Boyd said...
“Apparently Eilish suffers from Tourettes Syndrome, but it clearly hasn't held her back.”
I’m waiting for an artist that is so afflicted and incorporates that into the music. I’ve often told my wife that there is much artistic gold to be mined there.
Shit! fuck! ass!
"I’m waiting for an artist that is so afflicted and incorporates that into the music. I’ve often told my wife that there is much artistic gold to be mined there.
Shit! fuck! ass!"
Artie Lang has a hilarious story about being stuck in rehab with a guy with Tourettes.
I watched a movie last night (“Motherless Brooklyn”) that Edward Norton - who stars as a Tourette-suffering gumshoe and directs, as well - that I found quite entertaining (I said to my wife, “the mining of this vein finally begins”). The movie’s beginning is hilarious and I give it a recommendation.
Jack Klompus (enjoying that astronaut pen, by the way?), one of my favorite bookstores in this city used to be a second-hand bookstore where the owner-proprietor had Tourette's. I had been anrned about this by a friend, so I was prepared; but one day I was there, browsing, and some woman came in and asked him if they carried a certain book. He answered pleasantly enough, but then, as the woman turned away to hunt up the book, unleashed a barrage of obscenity. The woman's response was roughty, "Wait, what?" I retreated to the rear stacks to laugh myself silly.
Zooey D for me! Sis looks like a bee-otch.
Ms Eilish would have been about the same if she had gone to public school, I think.
And WTF is all this "curated appearance" crap?
And people, PLEASE tell me nobody is actually bothered by Howard.
Narr
Flirty babe fan
She's Punk Lite or Nouveau Alternative. Still nothing new under the sun, and it's only Wednesday.
I just checked out three of her videos and was bored out of my skull.
Reminds me of Lorde from a few years ago. Same thing could have been written.
Saw a clip of Lorde live and she sucked.
Just another marketing ploy.
The Next Big Artist is going to be someone who is a home-school drop out.
Music is a team sport.
I liked Billie Eilish's first couple of songs a lot, but her new album, the one that got all the Grammies, didn't even make my top ten list for the year. Still, she's a better choice than most Grammy winners by far, which is mostly a comment on how irrelevant and useless the Grammy awards are.
Zooey Deschanel is the latest in a series of female types I've gone gaga over, every decade the first was early sixties Natalie Wood; all petite, brunette, enormous eyes. Unlike the sloven Ms. Eilish, Zooey's fashion sense has been oddly old fashioned: dark wool skirts with bright colored tights and classic round toed strap shoes, perhaps a Tyrolean jacket...perfection! Must stop hanging around Pinterest so much...
Ms. Eilish is a flirty babe. She doesn't deny it. However, she seems to have a firm grasp of reality in context, a moderating perception, neither divergent nor monotonic. And she has a nice smile.
So many of her songs are about the meaninglessness of life and her desire to be dead.
I remember that move from high school: "So what? [insert name of artist no one has ever heard of] is better."
Of course, back then, maybe I was the only person who'd never heard of the artist who was supposed to be so great.
In my endless surfing, I've noticed this female for a few months now. I feel an enthusiastic "meh'. The young are lucky to not yet know what they will someday. No way to get that back, nor to fake it. Enjoy it while you can, little scruffies.
She reminds me a lot of a college girlfriend, who was very intelligent, and very inclined to take risks for the thrills. She died last year of a disease she gave me sharing those risks with her new boyfriend. At the time, nobody knew the risks involved, but we were warned that they were there anyway. We didn't believe the old folks, who ended up right completely by accident. Accidental wisdom, but not based on nothing.
"So many of her songs are about the meaninglessness of life and her desire to be dead."
At 18 years old, she knows stuff. No doubt we learn and get smarter, but do we learn how to be happier? I don't think most of us do. We just get distracted... a lot.
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