Billie’s newest music video dropped yesterday, and this time around, her self-directed video was for the last track on Happier Than Ever called “Male Fantasy”.

 

 

This video is one of her more simplistic ones and it feels grown up. The song is about heartbreak (and being frustrated that you can’t get yourself to actually hate them), and she brought it to life with a montage of shots depicting how much it sucks to go through it. I’m not one to cry while watching things, but this one got me. The dark rooms, staring in the mirror, opening the fridge every 30 minutes, curling up in bed, and sitting on the freezing cold bathroom floor to simply feel something...it’s all in there, the rawness and vulnerability is another example of her taking on this new era of growth and maturity in her career, so it’s interesting to see her explore that in different ways. She’s said that she’s hoping to make a music video for every song on the new album, so we’ll be seeing more of Billie’s creative evolution soon.

Another way she’s explored how she expresses herself is by changing up her look (as people do), and her most recent move was dyeing her hair brown. She posted the hair change on Instagram before debuting it at Variety’s Hitmakers Brunch this past weekend. 

 

I think she looks great. It makes her eyes pop. But the thing is...a lot of people dye their hair. So why is Gen Z freaking out so much? Here’s a Twitter roundup to give you a little bit of an idea of what it’s been looking like on my timeline.

 

I have to be honest—when she dyed her hair blonde ahead of Happier Than Ever, I took part in freaking out, but so was everyone else (everyone being the 23 million people who liked her blonde debut photo, making it the fastest Instagram post to get one million likes at the time). But that one was a little easier to understand because it was the end of green roots Billie, and the beginning of a new Billie. But now that Happier Than Ever is out and we’re still getting a tour and music videos from the same album, there’s not really anything to connect this brown hair to besides the fact that she’s a 19-year-old who likes to change her hair every once in a while. It also doesn’t seem to be something Billie thought would be such a big deal because her music video that came out yesterday featured her blonde hair, so if it was something she really wanted to push, I’m sure she would’ve had her hair dyed for the video as well. In her fifth installment of Vanity Fair’s annual interview with her, she touched on how she gets so confused as to why people think the style choices she makes is her new uniform until she picks another one.

 

While she may not understand it, it’s undeniable that she does have a hold on Gen Z, a generation that becomes personally to who they love in a very deep way (it started with 1D for me), and with that comes this fascination with what the next “move” is going to be. Change happens quickly at Billie’s age, and every time she does change, it’s social media mayhem. It’s like people are waiting for her to do the next different thing to call iconic (which is another word our generation tends to throw around a lot). So while Billie has been open about just trying a bunch of new things because that’s the season of life she’s in, her fans have been looking at it as something profound. 

 

As puzzling as it must be for her and anyone else who isn’t in the fandom or generation, I see it as the best case scenario for her. Billie changes her look up, and we’re just here to hype it up when it happens. She’s able to try new things without worrying about people saying she's doing something that isn’t her, because changing it up is her. Some celebrities have been put into this box which doesn’t allow them to play with their looks until a new era comes around. For Billie, it’s different because people expect a change now. Maybe her fans giving her all this hype is to show how much they support her in figuring out who she is...even if it’s just because having blonde hair might be hard to maintain during a tour (this is just a very loose theory of mine because hers starts up in February). 

One thing I am almost certain about is that there’s going to be at least one hair joke on Billie’s SNL hosting debut coming up this weekend. (Lainey: and probably a lot of crossover with Pete Davidson.) 

Attached - Billie touching down in New York the other day.