Is it just me, or has Selena Gomez been looking really good lately?
I came across a photo of her a few months ago wearing a sweater with a dinosaur on it, which was almost distracting enough to draw my attention from her rose-colored glasses (but not enough because she was wearing them sitting low on her nose). This positioning would require that she look down to reap the retinal benefits of wearing sunglasses, which is kind of counterproductive given that the sun is up, not down. You know what I mean?
Anyway, that picture pulled me into a vortex and before long, I was Gomez stalking on Getty like a celebrity tabloid writer. I refined my search to include only the past six months and what I found is that a lot of what she used to wear to espouse the image of a sleek and sexy Gomez who is no longer a Wizard of Waverly Place (see: the Disney channel) has changed. Here is a picture of her from last summer:
So grown up and demure and stuff, right? But lately, it’s been a lot more of this:
Sweatsuits and jeans and sundresses and so many pairs of sunglasses which actually really begs a question that has nothing to do with Selena Gomez and everything to do with how we (or probably I) process style.
If I didn’t care much for how she dressed when she was mostly cloaked in black, with her midriff and singular thigh out, but I do care now that she’s wearing more high-waist jeans and Jacquemus dresses and Vetements sweatsuits with Gucci sandals (I do wish she’d worn the patent leather socks they come with, too), what does that say other than that she’s dressing more to accommodate cues that I myself would take?
The thing is, I wonder how a person’s style could change so dramatically and so quickly. I know, I know, she has a stylist who puts clothes on her — I get that. But I also know that style is an intimate experience. It can genuinely make you feel like the most understood version of yourself (when you love how you look) or the most sociopathic version of yourself (when you’re not sure why the shit you’re wearing is what you’re wearing). When you’re a celebrity being pulled in various directions pertaining to the “image” you are supposed to espouse (I suppose right now, for Gomez, that image is “Vogue girl”), when do you get to be you? Do you ever get to be you? It might just be that this is par for the course for people who pretend to be other people professionally. Wearing different identities is probably just the tip of that iceberg.
Alternative: I’m over-intellectualizing exactly nothing and she’s just wearing clothes. Enjoy the perusal!
All photos via Getty Images.
