When Millie Bobby Brown first stepped out on the press tour for her new Netflix film, The Electric State, it was immediately clear that the actress was undergoing a transformation. With freshly bleached hair and outfits that channeled blonde bombshells from Pamela Anderson to Barbie herself, Brown was entering a new fashion era.
Like Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears and the other child stars turned pop culture icons that came before, Brown is shedding the image that we’ve seen since she first burst on to our screens in 2016 as Eleven in Stranger Things. At 21 years old, she’s becoming her own person and we should be embracing that. Instead, just also like the stars that came before her, Brown has experienced the wrath of a media obsessed with putting women in boxes and demonizing any changes.
“I grew up in front of the world, and for some reason, people can’t seem to grow with me,” Brown opened up in a March 4 video shared on her Instagram after numerous articles were written about her changing appearance. “Instead, they act like I’m supposed to stay frozen in time, like I should still look the way I did on Stranger Things Season 1. And because I don’t, I’m now a target.”
Brown goes on to name and shame specific writers, many who are women, who dissected her looks online.
“I refuse to apologize for growing up. I refuse to make myself smaller to fit the unrealistic expectations of people who can’t handle seeing a girl become a woman,” she added. “I will not be shamed for how I look, how I dress, or how I present myself.”
Her message is one the world needed to be reminded of. But it’s not one we’ve never heard before. Earlier this year, another former child star, Brooke Shields, published her latest book, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed To Get Old. The apt title was inspired by a conversation she had with a man who was disgusted to learn her real age.
“We imprint on people at certain ages,” Shields said at a January 13 talk hosted by Flow Space. “When grow older, we’re not ready for it because our personal relationship with that person is no longer the same and therefore we’ve aged as well… I had the gall to actually get older.”
The book unpacks much of what Brown is experiencing except through the lens of a woman who has been victimized in this way for decades, ever since she was the age Brown is now.
“No one knows what to do with me,” Shields writes in the introduction of the memoir. “After all, Brooke Shields is not allowed to get old. The sixteen-year-old Calvin Klein model? Time magazine’s face of the ’80s? It’s sacrilegious!”
Shields, who has certainly been picked apart in all the ways Brown is and then some, has been trying to course correct for decades, reminding us that getting older is a privilege and eternal youth is not something you owe to the world.
“For me, as my body and face change in all the ways they should,” she wrote. “There is this sense of How dare you? That was never the plan, young lady! And, to be totally honest, there have been times when it’s made me feel like a disappointment.”
What Shields points to throughout the book is that women can never do right under patriarchal society’s glare. Damned if you age, damned if you don’t.
“I look back sometimes and feel like I’ve done something wrong because I no longer have the body or the face that I used to have,” she wrote. “And yet, if I did anything drastic to hold on to my looks from my youth or to stop aging, I’d be judged or chastised for that, too.”
This is the reality Brown is facing. The articles she specifically references allude to some drastic transformation that is somehow wrong. “‘Why are Gen Zers like Millie Bobby Brown ageing so badly?’ by Lydia Hawken,” Brown names as one example. “‘What has Millie Bobby Brown done to her face?’ by John Ely,” she says as another.
There is no winning, as Shields carefully notes, and the only way out for women is for this kind of commentary to end. Shields has spent much of the past decade pushing back against the way she has been torn apart in the media for decades. Don’t force Brown to have to do the same.
Before you go, click here to see some of the most dramatic celebrity transformations of the past decade.
