Billie Eilish is no stranger to making history. In 2020, she became the youngest artist to ever win all four major Grammy categories in the same year (Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist). She was the youngest person to win Album of the Year for her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?
The “Birds of a Feather” singer also made history at the Oscars, by becoming the youngest person to win two Academy Awards. Last year, she and her brother, Finneas O’Connell, took home the Best Original Song Oscar for “What Was I Made For?” from the Barbie soundtrack. It was the duo’s second Oscar, following their 2022 win for “No Time to Die,” and the win also made Eilish the first Oscar winner born in the 21st century.
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She’s broken other records, too: When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? had the biggest opening week for a debut album in the history of Billboard’s current chart. She became the youngest artist ever to record a James Bond theme song, and in 2022, she was the youngest headliner in Coachella’s history.
A vegan arena and a climate-conscious tour
But the Los Angeles native is hoping that she’ll also be known for breaking other records, those that affect us all a bit more personally. Last month, at London’s O2 Arena, the singer set another record, not with ticket sales or surprise guests, but with a mandate that fundamentally changed how a major concert venue operates. For six consecutive nights, the O2 went entirely vegan, like Eilish, who’s followed a vegan diet since she was 12.
Every concession stand, bar, and backstage spread was free of animal products. Fans were still served concussion staples like tacos and pizza, but made vegan. The decision wasn’t just a tour quirk. It was a deliberate act of environmental advocacy woven into every element of the “Hit Me Hard and Soft” tour experience. This wasn’t the artist’s first time turning the O2 Arena vegan, either. Back in 2022, Eilish partnered with Impossible Foods to transform the venue as part of a six-day climate summit.
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This time around, a short film narrated by Eilish played to the packed arena, highlighting her team’s sustainability efforts: plant-based meals for crew and artists, low-emission transportation, and recycled merchandise. Outside the stage area, an Eco Village created in partnership with her mother Maggie Baird’s nonprofit Support + Feed encouraged fans to pledge to go plant-based for 30 days. More than 200 people signed up during the final show alone.
The activation wasn’t announced in advance. It emerged mid-residency, without fanfare, as a fully realized proof-of-concept for greener stadium experiences. The broader context makes the experiment all the more urgent. According to the United Nations, animal agriculture is responsible for approximately 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions—more than all maritime and air transportation combined. A 2023 study published in Nature Food projected that if the world’s wealthiest nations reduced meat consumption by just 50 percent, global agricultural emissions could drop by nearly 40 percent.
Meanwhile, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that the world is on track to surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming within the next decade if current emissions trends continue. The climate crisis is no longer theoretical—it is visible in record-breaking heatwaves, catastrophic wildfires, and the collapse of ecosystems once thought resilient. In January, Eilish’s hometown of Los Angeles battled the biggest wildfires in its history, brought about by changing weather patterns attributed to global temperature rise. In this landscape, Eilish’s decision to once more remove animal products from a venue of this scale—if only for six nights—signals what cultural influence can look like when aligned with planetary realities.
More than a message
This wasn’t Eilish’s first large-scale integration of climate advocacy into pop culture. In 2022, she launched the Overheated climate summit, also at the O2 Arena, during her “Happier Than Ever” world tour. The event included performances, panels, film screenings, and workshops on topics like sustainable fashion and the link between plant-based diets and the climate crisis. The summit, produced in collaboration with Reverb and Support + Feed, returned in 2023 and 2025 in London and Berlin. These were not side shows, but central to the touring experience, embedded into the venues where fans came expecting music but encountered climate literacy instead.
Support + Feed
She’s not sitting cross-legged in protest outside government buildings; she’s filling stadiums and whispering climate cues between songs. Less defiant than Greta Thunberg but no less impactful, Eilish is a kind of pied piper for a generation that might not attend a climate rally but will gladly take her lead if it comes with a merch table and a message.
In her 2023 cover interview with Vogue, Eilish credits her mother for much of her own awakening. “My mom is the most determined and most passionate person,” Eilish said. “It’s thanks to her that I know anything.”
Baird’s low-impact commitments and ethical parenting style helped lay the groundwork for what has become one of the most comprehensive celebrity-led climate campaigns of the decade.“My whole existence is based around family, but especially my mom,” Eilish told Vogue.
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Making the rounds on social recently is a viral Billboard video of Eilish explaining how she’s never used paper towels: “You just get a cloth wet and then you’re good,” she said. “I think I have my mom’s gene of really caring about the world and animals and not wasting things,” she said.
Building a system, not a statement
At the 2021 Met Gala, Eilish wore a peach Oscar de la Renta gown on the condition that the label permanently ban fur from its collections. “It was an honor to wear this dress knowing that going forward Oscar de la Renta will be completely fur-free,” she wrote on Instagram. That moment marked a rare instance of a luxury brand reversing course due to an artist’s request—and doing so publicly, in real time.
In 2022, she chose a Gucci gown made entirely from deadstock fabrics, a move that signaled to the fashion world that red carpet glamour and sustainability were not mutually exclusive. A year later, she became the face of the brand’s first Demetra vegan leather bag, saying, “It’s a new understanding, and one that isn’t afraid to evolve in a new direction, that truly matters to me.”
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Eilish’s philosophy has become a kind of invisible ink, shaping how the industry moves around her. Choices made behind the scenes are slowly becoming new norms.
Most recently, she and her mother partnered with Universal Music Group’s Bravado to salvage more than 400,000 unsold tour T-shirts, reprinting and reissuing them instead of sending them to landfill. The scale of that decision is rarely matched in the music industry, where merchandise waste is often treated as an afterthought. In Eilish’s universe, even a T-shirt becomes a site of possibility. Bravado’s CEO Matt Young noted that the warehouse where the shirts were stored “looked like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark,” a nod to the scale of neglect the project confronted. Eilish saw potential instead of surplus.
Meanwhile, her social influence continues to ripple as she releases hit after hit. Eilish is not the only celebrity calling attention to climate and ethics issues. But she is perhaps the most methodical. Where others post infographics or deliver earnest soundbites at awards shows, she embeds her politics into the infrastructure of performance, fashion, and merchandise. Her influence is architectural.
Gucci
When viewed together—venue takeovers, fashion ultimatums, food system shifts, and circular merch models—it becomes clear that the Billie Eilish effect isn’t aesthetic. It’s systemic. It is not about making sustainability fashionable. It’s about making it functional. In a climate era where every fraction of a degree matters, that precision is its own kind of power.
“We all wish that we could just do it ourselves. I wish I could just make changes in my life and save the world alone,” she said. “Grow my own food and live off the grid. Erase my carbon footprint. But all that does is erase me. When really, if every single person just did half of what they should do, we could fix this.”
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