Jennie Opens Up About Body Image Pressures She Felt at the Start of Her Career

In her Cosmopolitan cover interview published on the 3rd, Jennie described the past year in a single word: chaotic. "Honestly, there wasn't a single moment to stop, sit down, and fully absorb what Ruby brought into my life," she said.

The admission carries weight when you look at her schedule. Jennie debuted with BLACKPINK in 2016 and spent years building a catalog that includes some of the group's biggest tracks. Her solo career began in earnest in 2018, but the last twelve months marked a different kind of threshold: her first full-length solo album, Ruby, followed almost immediately by the single "Less Than a Lover" last month. The pace left little room for reflection.

The interview's most personal passage concerned her relationship with her own body. Jennie, who describes herself as petite, said she felt real pressure early in her career to appear taller or physically larger on stage and in photographs. "There were definitely parts of myself I felt insecure about," she said. "At the beginning, I felt I had to make myself look bigger."

That pressure, she suggested, has loosened considerably. "Now I'm learning to love my body as it is, and figuring out which styles suit my frame best. I feel more confident in myself than I used to." The phrase she returned to was direct: "I'm becoming friends with my body."

It is a small but telling shift in how she talks about herself publicly. Early-career Jennie was meticulous about image in a way that felt more managed than personal; the version speaking here sounds like someone who has made a deliberate choice to let that management go, at least in part.

She was equally open about the BLACKPINK members. With each of them now pursuing separate projects, Jennie was asked whether the bond between them has changed. Her answer was unequivocal. "We grew up together," she said. "Through the hard moments and the good ones, we were always there for each other. We looked out for one another, exchanged advice. Because of that, I never once felt lost."

She added that she is genuinely grateful to still be able to lean on them even as their individual paths diverge, describing the shared history as something that does not erode with distance or time apart.