Billie Eilish is the same “monk-teen” person-of-interest fifth year in a row, according to Vanity Fair writer Virginia Heffernan. Or so she tells her in a fun interview the magazine published Monday.
“I’m like a fourth-grader,” Eilish said. “I have a lot of process. I think that there is no such thing as either one way or the other, because you can’t predict what’s going to happen. You can’t know what’s going to change or change over and over.”
That uniqueness, Heffernan said, is what makes her a celebrity. “Her warm and poetic conversationalism makes her both an almost godlike character and yet also seemingly as normal as she can be,” Heffernan wrote. “Her joy of fashion and her fascination with music — part of why she has such a unique online persona — makes her both easily accessible and strikingly unlike anyone else out there.”
Here’s some of the best lines from Heffernan’s interview, whose snippets make it one of the best in the magazine’s 84-year history:
On her infamous vapor pen meltdown:
“I was not kidding when I told [my father] that there had been ‘a certain clash of thousands of lights’ that night,” Eilish said. “I was being dramatic. I could see the end of history coming. And everything was a big letdown.”
On finding the right Instagram stylist:
“I’ve been interested in fashion ever since I was 10 years old,” Eilish said. “It helped me grow up a lot. It taught me about style and about picking outfits, about striking a balance with my mood and personality. I tried to figure out how to be cool. I remember spending weeks and weeks figuring out how to wear a dress. My dad actually had a whole room that would just be made out of clothes, and when we got home we would hang out and the best thing about it was that he would play records from the 1970s and help me fashion what I wanted to wear.
On her celebrity meeting up with D.C.’s twenty-somethings in March at Crossroads:
“It was so much fun,” Eilish said. “The crowd made me feel safe. I went there because it was free, and they had so much coffee on the tables. I’m talking about really strong coffee. I was so blown away by it. I loved the baristas because they took pride in who they were. There was a girl that was the most very sweet and love-y person, and everybody was just in such a good mood, and it was a really fun atmosphere. And I felt so comfortable. I couldn’t speak for everybody else but for me, it was great.”