Bebe Rexha opens up about size discrimination in the fashion industry
“Oh god, I think we need coffee.” Bebe Rexha’s Staten Island drawl carries over the early-morning hush of one of London’s oldest hotels. A waiter in a starched white waistcoat arrives with a silver pot, pouring us both a steaming cup. He turns to leave but she stops him. “Do you know what?” she says, beaming politely. “Can you just leave the entire pot?
We’re in a private room the morning after Rexha landed from LA and, aside from the universal uniform of the jet-lagged (black hoodie, joggers, sliders, zero make-up), you’d have no idea that she’s battling through a fog of exhaustion. It’s 8am and she has a day-long photoshoot ahead of her, but she bounces between topics with the sort of energy you don’t normally get from musicians at this time in the morning. With her first cup of coffee gulped down, she ponders our old-fashioned surroundings. “I really hate the lighting in here. If my room wasn’t so messy, I’d say let’s go up there instead,” she starts out. “That’s growing into a woman for you – you know what you like.”
That’s who Bebe Rexha is now: a 30-year-old woman who knows exactly what she likes and, crucially, what she doesn’t. But it wasn’t always that way. Like many women in the public eye, and particularly those in the murky, cut-throat world of the music industry, she has had to learn the hard way what she will and won’t tolerate on the path to success and stardom.
Raised in New York by Albanian parents, she signed her first record deal with Warner Bros at 23 and flew out to LA alone. “I remember when I saw Britney [Spears] make it big for the first time, she was 17. So when I turned 18 I was like, ‘That’s it, I didn’t make it.’ I felt the same when I hit 21, and throughout my twenties. At 27 I had a breakdown.”
But although she had yet to find fame, her talent was quietly garnering attention. Rexha became a behind-the-scenes writer for artists like Selena Gomez, Nick Jonas and Iggy Azalea, and had co-written Eminem and Rihanna’s 'The Monster' by 24. The Grammy-winning No1 hit was a major boost to her CV, and she started being featured as a singer on the tracks she had co-written (including David Guetta’s 'Hey Mama' and Louis Tomlinson’s 'Back To You') before finally scoring her solo breakthrough last year with the single 'Meant To Be', landing two Grammy nominations of her own.
It’s fitting, therefore, that her debut album, which has had over 1.3 billion streams, is called Expectations – because she is an artist who has been both fighting to uphold those placed on her, and simultaneously smashing them to pieces ever since that first record deal six years ago.
Because even as a signed artist, Rexha just didn’t fit the mould. “When I first got signed, the label said, ‘Are you ready to get in boot-camp shape?’ They wanted me to lose 20lb (almost a stone and a half). Back then I was so small, I was only 130lb [around 9 stone]. It f*cked me up. I was so cold all the time. I would starve myself before filming a music video.” Without pausing for breath, she tells me matter-of-factly about a female creative director who made her work out twice a day. “She’d sit opposite me at the dinner table and say, ‘You’re not losing enough.’ All I was eating was salad.”
To be clear, the woman opposite me is – to you and I – not even plus-sized. She’s a healthy and curvaceous size 10. Smaller than the average UK woman (a size 16) and certainly than the average woman in the US (UK size 20). But in her world, particularly at the time she was coming up through the pop ranks, hers was an industry dominated by a body standard that, for most, feels unrealistic at best, and borderline dangerous at worst.
After seven years of dealing with size discrimination behind closed doors, of facing producers and directors and agents who talked about her weight as though it wasn’t something bound up with her feelings and sense of self- worth, something happened. In January 2019, Rexha needed a dress for the Grammys. After weeks of searching, a message came in from her stylist: “Honestly? People are saying you’re too big to fit into their dresses.”
“It broke my heart. I was so sad, so depressed. I felt like I was garbage.” That sadness hardened into something much more powerful – rage. “I thought to myself, ‘This is bullshit,’ she explains, words tumbling out of her like lava. “I was mad. I wasn’t trying to get back at anyone, but I wasn’t standing for it any more. I was in the studio and I just left, went into the kitchen, and made a video on my phone.”
A post shared by Bebe Rexha (@beberexha) on Jan 21, 2019 at 9:44am PST
That video has been watched over 2 million times on Instagram and shared worldwide. Her message hit home: “If a [US] size 6/8 is too big then I don’t know what to tell you… That’s crazy. You’re saying that all the women in the world that are a size 8 and up are not beautiful and they cannot wear your dresses… f*ck you, I don’t want to wear your f*cking dresses.”
Her post galvanized a global conversation about body image and size discrimination that even reached industry icons like the late Karl Lagerfeld (who sent her pieces to try on) and led to an outpouring of love and respect for Rexha on social media.
On our cover shoot in north London a few hours after she tells me this story, I can see why so many fell in love with her. As she sets about smashing the mannequins on our set, lifeless symbols that represent the impossible beauty standards she and other stars like her are often measured against, a core of steel emerges. That same fight, the outrage that led to her creating that video, is what sets her apart for her fans and followers.
That nerve may also have saved her career – because it is not just the entertainment industry’s damaging attitude to her weight that has forced Rexha to put her gloves up. She’s had to fight to protect her talent from the music industry’s instinct to exploit her.
“When I first got to LA, I worked with a very big producer. He put me in a room with lots of other songwriters and engineers who all seemed high [on drugs]. One writer walked in and said, ‘Listen – you have no hits, but I have loads, so I’m going to go downstairs and party with my friends and you’re going to write a song, record the vocals and edit it. That will be our song that we wrote together.’”
That encounter happened at the home of producer Dr Luke, real name Lukasz Sebastian Gottwald, who had flown Rexha to LA for her big break.
Just a year later, his profile was raised when the singer Kesha filed a lawsuit against Gottwald citing numerous allegations, including emotional distress and employment discrimination. He filed a countersuit alleging defamation, and all claims were eventually dropped, with Kesha remaining in a recording contract with him that meant she didn’t release any music for four years.
When I ask her about Kesha, she says quite simply, “I was scared that could have been my situation. I remember being at a dinner party with [Kesha and her mother, Pebe Sebert]. Her mom came up to me and whispered, ‘Don’t do it.’ She was talking about working with Dr Luke. The music industry can be a dark place, and she could have been trying to stop me from getting in her daughter’s way. But I listened and honestly? Trusting her was the best thing I ever did.”
Worse still, Rexha has felt the full force of the music industry’s predatory sexual practices and insidious bullying on her path to the top. “There was a producer who would come into the studio and massage my feet. One time he tried to go above my knees and was getting a little rough, [so] I pulled my feet away. He said, ‘Nah, I’m going to do what I want’. But I was raised to never let someone touch my body if I don’t want them to.”
Still, he persisted. Once his assistant phoned her in the middle of the night to say the producer in question wanted to buy Rexha a sundress to wear with “no underwear”. “He’s really famous,” Rexha says, unblinking. “My former managers said, ‘Just work with him, you need a hit song.’”
Has she ever felt afraid for her life? I ask. There’s a pause. “There was one night. I was alone in the studio and a [different] producer had a group of five or six guys with him. I had heard things about him from his past and I just couldn’t take it any more. I felt like I was going to get raped. I quietly called myself a taxi from the recording booth, which was enclosed, and I got the f*ck out of there. It was the worst night ever.”
It was that moment, and many others like it, that led Rexha to start Women In Harmony in 2018, an initiative to help female creatives in the music industry support each other. So far she has hosted dinners in LA and London, attended by the likes of Rita Ora and Charli XCX. “I wish I’d had someone to talk to when I was going through all of that. You need support. I want to create a safe environment for women to come together.”
Her next album, due in 2020, is “deeply personal”, she tells me – a collection of songs that address the insecurities she has battled since she was 11. If her debut album, the reaction to Grammy-gate and this year’s slew of live dates are anything to go by, it could tip her from “one to watch” to global stardom.
Post-shoot, as Rexha wipes off her make-up, shrugs on her hoodie, assembles her all-female entourage and prepares to head back to the hotel where we started our day over 10 hours ago, I’m relieved. Not just because she loves the photos or that she’s happy with our choice of soundtrack for the shoot (ironically it’s On A Roll by Ashley O, the manipulated pop star played by Miley Cyrus in Black Mirror), but relieved that the music industry is still capable of producing stars like her in the first place. Someone who isn’t always prepared to toe pop’s party line and – as with the mannequins she smashed up earlier – who knows that sometimes you have to break things apart before they can be rebuilt.
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