Billie Eilish has shared a surprising revelation about her first name.
In an interview with British Vogue, the singer chatted to fellow star Idris Elba about whether she used to be “proud” or “embarrassed” of her moniker growing up.
The Grammy award-winning musician didn’t hold back and revealed she “absolutely hated” her name when she was a child – particularly as other people would say they thought it was a “boy’s name”.
“That’s all I ever heard every day of my life. I remember just being so mad, and all I wanted was to have a girly name, like Violet or like Lavender, some sort of, you know, pretty flowery name,” she continued.
Yet now she’s learned to love it and said “there’s no other name in the universe that could be my name besides Billie”.
The Birds Of A Feather singer is inspiring a new generation of babies called Billie – and is probably also contributing to a rise in interest for gender neutral baby names.
Baby names data for England and Wales (in 2023, the most up-to-date data we have) suggested pop culture continued to influence the popularity of baby names.
The first musician cited? Billie Eilish.
Fellow singer Lana Del Rey was also mentioned, alongside the Kardashian-Jenner family, Margot Robbie and Cillian Murphy.
The data suggests there were 296 babies called Billie in 2023. To put that into perspective, 2,906 babies were given the most popular name, Amelia, that year.
In Ireland, the name Billie was ranked 191 of all baby girls born in 2024.
Meanwhile the National Records of Scotland said a total of 34 baby girls were given the name Billie in Scotland in 2020, with its popularity increasing by a massive 79% in the last two years.
The appetite for unisex names is showing no signs of slowing, either.
In 2023, Sophie Kihm, name expert at Nameberry, told Metro such names were on the rise because “they give children flexibility should they not identify with their birth gender, but also because gender neutral names are modern choices with contemporary style”.
More recently, baby naming expert Jessie Paquette shared a TikTok video in which she predicted a couple of trends that will stick around – the first being “nursing home” (vintage) names and another being “gender bendy” names.
“Gender, how we view gender, is going to continue to evolve and I think that’s very far from a short-lived trend,” she said.
More examples of gender neutral (or unisex) names include Atlas, Avery, Blake, Cameron, Charlie, Kendall, Marlow and Parker.
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