Riot Grrrl Icon Kathleen Hanna Says Billie Eilish Inspired Her “To Wear Baggy Clothes”

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Without feminist punk trailblazers like Kathleen Hanna, we likely wouldn’t have contemporary rebel girl pop stars like Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish. But for as much as Gen Z owes Gen X, the riot grrrl icon revealed that Eilish has impacted her as well, freeing her from wearing skinny jeans.

In a new interview with Rolling Stone about her forthcoming memoir Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk, the Bikini Kill frontwoman shared that watching Eilish’s rise to fame inspired her “to wear baggy clothes for the first time in my life.”

“I’m over 50, and I’m wearing baggy pants and a baggy shirt, and running my errands, and having a lovely day, and I’m like, thank you Billie Eilish,” she said. “But even something like that, the representation of a woman on stage, a performer on stage, whose music I happen to really like, wearing baggy clothes, which seems like not a big deal. It trickled down into my life, and it made me be like, ‘Why am I wearing tight black jeans every day? I don’t have to do this.’ So, yeah, thanks Billie Eilish for making that cool.”

In *Rolling Stone,* Billie Eilish talked about masturbation, her sexuality, and how she reacted to being “outed”.

Despite Hanna hand-waving it away as “not a big deal,” it’s true that female performers face pressures to look a certain way onstage. Eilish’s style has evolved significantly over the years, but when she was first rising to fame (as a 15-year-old, no less), she certainly made headlines for the signature oversized silhouette of her wardrobe. Eilish has spoken about how the clothes acted as a protective mechanism for her — in a 2019 Calvin Klein ad, the pop star said, “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.”

Eilish and Hanna might differ sartorially and musically in a lot of ways, but it’s clear that they share a subversive undercurrent. In the same way that the riot grrrl style that Hanna helped pioneer reclaimed and remixed traditionally “girly” clothing to feminist ends, Eilish’s choices, too, seem to stem from the same desire to reclaim her body on her own terms.

Rolling Stone also asked Hanna about her longtime advocacy for intersectional feminism, and how that conversation has seeped into the mainstream in the past few years. The punk artist said that she had “two conflicting opinions” on intersectionality and media: “One, representation is massively important, and two, representation is not the same as legislation.”

“We can put as many Black female judges on TV as we want, but in reality, the majority of judges are not Black women,” Hanna said. “And until we actually make that a reality, it’s important to know the distinction between the two.”

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Originally Appeared on them.