Billie Eilish Public Impersonations

About

Billie Eilish Public Impersonations refers to a viral YouTube trend in which YouTubers dress up like Billie Eilish and go out in public to see if they solicit attention. Though the videos became popular in 2019, Billie Eilish took to Instagram in 2020 to ask fans to stop pretending to be her in public.

Origin

On August 2nd, 2019, YouTuber Deshae Frost Vlogs uploaded the first known of the trending videos which accumulated over 5.4 million views and 304,000 likes in five months. The video is titled "TURNED MY GIRL INTO BILLIE EILISH – GOT MOBBED/SHUT DOWN MALL IN PUBLIC Social Experiment."

Spread

On August 6th, 2019, YouTuber Basic Barbie uploaded a public Eilish impersonation video "BILLIE EILISH LOOK-A-LIKE PRANK IN PUBLIC I dressed up as Billie Eilish" (shown below). The video gained over 93,700 views in five months.

On October 26th, 2019, Lael Hansen uploaded "INSANE BILLIE EILISH TRANSFORMATION SHUT DOWN MALL" (shown below, left). The video garnered over 2.5 million views and 108,000 likes in three months. On November 1st, YouTuber Benji uploaded a similar video with 733,000 views (shown below, right).

On January 30th, 2020, Billie Eilish took to Instagram stories to share a photo of a YouTuber pretending to be her with the message "please stop doing this shit. it is not safe for you and it is mean to the people that dont know any better you make me look bad." PopBuzz^[1] shared screenshots of her stories which feature Jordan Matter the next day (shown below).

On January 30th, Instagram^[2] user jordanmatter shared a photo from her video shoot in which she pretended to be billie (shown below). The image was captioned:

Hello everyone. You’ve been commenting on the video shoot I did yesterday, and I’d like to respond. I gathered a crowd and had an acrobat pretending to be Billie do a huge cheer flip, which revealed it was not Billie. I had absolutely no intention of disrespecting Billie. I’m a big fan, like everyone else. I’ve never done a celebrity impersonation video before, but they’re pretty common so I thought it would be fun to add my own acrobatic twist. I felt it was completely harmless since at no time in the video are we pretending that she is actually Billie. I have reached out directly to Billie and Maggie and apologized, and I will not post the video without their permission. I hope this clarifies everything.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References