The German edition of Nylon magazine has found itself on the bad side of “Bad Guy” singer Billie Eilish.
This week, this publication released an illustrated cover featuring the 17-year-old musician that drew the ire of the artist and her fans.
The cover, which was posted on Instagram and has since been deleted, depicted Eilish as bald, robotic and bare shouldered.
In a lengthy comment posted to the magazine’s cover-revealing post, Eilish wrote that neither she nor her management team were ever “approached by nylon about this piece whatsoever.”
Eilish took issue with the fact that she had “no creative input” on the image in her likeness and with the artist’s choices.
“You’re gonna make a picture of me shirtless?? that’s not real?? at 17?” she wrote.
Her comment was deleted with the original post, but Nylon Germany said it never meant to do any harm.
“We as NYLON Germany value and stand for artistic freedom, but we also respect the feelings of @billieeilish and her fandom. We are fans ourselves. Therefore we decided to remove our second cover of Billie Eilish,” the publication wrote in the caption accompanying a different photo. “For this cover, it was never our intention to create a look that is confusing or insulting to Billie. It was only ever our intention to honor her impact by creating this avatar, which is part of a cover series highlighting the power of digital prodigy artists.”
Other covers in this series, by artist Marcel C. Wilkens, included a tribute to twin sisters and German video stars Lisa and Lena.
A photo of the Eilish cover remained up on Wilkens’ Instagram page as of Friday afternoon.
Eilish recently made history as the youngest woman to hit the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 charts since a then-16-year-old Demi Lovato debuted “Here We Go Again” in 2009. She’s also one of more than 100 artists to join Planned Parenthood’s “Bans Off My Body” campaign.
