Back at Milk, Eilish and Slimane wrap their shoot around 3:00pm. Maggie Baird checks with everyone on set that the vegan catering from KitchenMouse will not be thrown out. She tells me that during the pandemic she and Billie started a program called Support and Feed, whose mission is to provide nutritious, planet-friendly, plant-based food for those in need. In the same spirit, Eilish only agreed to wear her head-turning, old Hollywood glamor-esque Oscar De La Renta dress to the 2021 Met Gala if the fashion house promised to go fur-free in the future. As Baird explains that the whole point of fame is to change the world for the better, Eilish is back in her dressing area throwing on the sweats and a Gucci backpack before heading off. Everyone began to make their way back to their cars, back to the streets of LA that had been so famously captured in the late Joan Didion’s writing.  “Anyone can ‘drive’ on the freeway, and many people with no vocation for it do, hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going,” she wrote in her essay On the Road. Similarly, in Eilish’s music video for “NDA,” the singer walks down a deserted street under the cloak of night, somewhere between careless and carefree, her blond hair whipping around in the wind—perhaps the Santa Ana winds that Didion helped immortalize in her work. A spotlight begins to grow, illuminating Eilish, until we realize that it’s the headlights of cars beginning to race chaotically toward her. “Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway,” Didion finished. Read my full story at the link in bio. From V135 Spring/Summer 2022 Photography: @hedislimane Fashion: @mandaknowsbutts Interview: @mathiasrosenzweig Makeup: @robrumseymua (@aframe_agency) Hair: @salonbenjamin Editors: @thekevinponce / @overlyopinionatedblackperson / @daniacurvy @alexblynn Casting: @itboygregk (@gkldprojects)