Selena Gomez met Nicolas Ghesquière the new old-fashioned way—she got his email address from a mutual friend and dashed off a letter of introduction. “I was immediately intrigued by her spontaneity and curiosity,” the Louis Vuitton creative director remembers. “Actually, he loved my song ‘Good for You,’ ” Gomez says. “That was the real icebreaker.” Two years later, in addition to being a regular at Ghesquière’s shows, joining him at the Met Gala this past May, and even sharing the cover of Brazilian Vogue, Gomez is now his latest campaign star.

And while a celebrity endorsement might sound like par for the course at a global brand, the relationship is actually more an affirmation that, at 24, Gomez is (finally) a full-fledged fashion force.

“Let’s just say I wasn’t always the [designers’] top choice,” Gomez says. She’s in L.A. during a brief respite from an 81-city tour—which includes costume pieces from Vuitton, Valentino, Rodarte, and Monse, the buzzed-about label by Oscar de la Renta alumni Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia—behind her second solo album, Revival. Gomez’s offstage choices have been equally eclectic lately, from Victoria Beckham to Vetements, from Givenchy to London-based start-up Galvan.

Gomez has more followers than any other person on Instagram—90.6 million at press time, a few hundred thousand more than when I interviewed her two days ago—and holds the record for its most-liked photo to date. If there were a nation inhabited solely by @selenagomez’s followers, it would be the sixteenth most populous country in the world—bigger than Germany or France. Small wonder that fashion brands came around.

Gomez’s success with social media, though, is inherently tied to her absolute relatability. Born to a sixteen-year-old mother in Grand Prairie, Texas, Gomez, until recently, still lived with roommates in Calabasas. She ate McDonald’s with James Corden on her episode of “Carpool Karaoke”; she loves David O. Russell movies. She’s also a Mexican-American icon, the inheritor of a cultural legacy that dates to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, Gomez’s namesake. Approachability has never been fashion’s first priority, but in an era that prizes reality over ceremony, her perceived normality goes a long way.

Originally posted by Tower

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