Selena Interview After Fashion Show English
Yous have to start with the right bra. If you start gluing rhinestones onto any old brassiere lying around, you're bound to fail. "It won't look the aforementioned," says Monica Peralta, a 27-year-sometime Selena fan from Los Angeles. "It really won't!" She recommends a sturdy bra from Victoria's Secret or Carnival Creations—one like Selena would have used.
To recreate Selena's timeless, bejeweled bustiers, Peralta has studied countless photos, as well as interviews with the late tejano singer'due south family members, to glean clues as to how her intricate stage looks came together. On her YouTube channel, which has more than 10,000 followers, Peralta documents her process then that fans can larn how to pay homage to La Reina with meticulously embellished clothing. Over the years, she's delivered tutorials on how to replicate Selena's hair, makeup, argument hats—even the studded leather jacket she wore to the 1994 Tejano Music Awards. The demand for such tips makes clear that, for Selena devotees, there's much more to the singer's appeal than just the music.
Today, her songs remain a force for many reasons, none more powerful than her insistence on simultaneously elevating Tejano culture and propelling it into the time to come. Though she wasn't raised speaking Spanish, early in her career, she sang tejano songs phonetically in their traditional language. At the aforementioned time, she and her band stretched the definition of the genre by singing in English and working disco, R & B, and funk flourishes into her tunes.
Yet nosotros rarely talk about how Selena'south style sensibility evoked a like tension. "I find that Selena'southward interest in fashion ofttimes gets diminished to, 'Oh, she likes glitter,'" says Maria Garcia, the El Paso Canton–raised creator of public radio's Anything for Selena podcast. Such an attitude radically undersells how interesting Selena's fashion sense was. As in her music, she refused to accept the binary of staying truthful to your culture or eschewing it. She chose a different path, embracing her culture while likewise demanding that it evolve.
Equally a way icon, Selena unabashedly celebrated her Mexican American heritage rather than conforming to Eurocentric beauty standards. Few Latino celebrities made much headway in nineties American popular civilization, and those who did often dealt with the cruelties of racism. In his autobiography, for case, Ricky Martin writes about never feeling truly comfortable on the set of Full general Hospital, where he landed a office in the mid-nineties, and coming to believe his Puerto Rican accent sounded "horrible." Pop stars in the Mexican amusement industry, such as Paulina Rubio and Thalía, tended to accept fairer pare and lighter hair than Selena did. Both Rubio and Thalía attempted English-language crossovers and played up their whiteness to varying degrees.
That is what made Selena then different, says Garcia. "At the time, you never saw people like that on tv, even in Latin American programming." Selena chose to emphasize the shape of her lips with a bright, signature red tint; she embraced her perennially frizzy, dark brown hair and her body type, which didn't fit a size-zero mold. (One episode of Anything for Selena is titled "Big Butt Politics.")
Today, Selena'south epitome is an essential function of American style—which likely would have seemed unimaginable to her when she was trying to cleave out a space for herself in U.S. pop culture.
Selena'southward look mirrored the sartorial choices of Texas's Mexican American working-class communities while simultaneously cartoon on the influence of some of her pop star idols, such as Janet Jackson, Madonna, and Whitney Houston. Even when she was reaching for sophisticated styles, she did so on a budget. "She wore rhinestones that you lot could tell were rhinestones," Garcia says, laughing. "She wasn't trying to pretend that she was wearing diamonds." To create the splotches on the cow-impress outfit she wore at a 1991 performance in San Antonio, she used black sequins bachelor for purchase at any arts and crafts store. She wore plenty of denim, too, often opting for tight, blackness, high-waisted jeans onstage, and occasionally employing more rugged, light-done varieties. Selena took everyday ranchero references and glammed them up a bit—such as that studded motorbike jacket that now sits in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. In Garcia's words, she "legitimized" these aesthetics, adorning Tejano touchstones and making them into something to be coveted and admired.
And while Selena's clothes often bore a handcrafted element, they likewise had an elegant sheen. At the 1994 Grammys, where she won Best Mexican-American Album, she sported red lipstick and a teased updo, and wore a shimmering beaded gown. The epitome of her clutching her Grammy while beaming at the photographic camera cemented her status every bit a new fellow member of pop music royalty—a point driven home when Whitney Houston, who took home Album of the Year and Record of the Year, graced the phase in a similar getup: a glistening, pearl-colored gown paired with a tousled updo.
Selena was shaped by the reigning artists of the day, especially the Black women whose music she was surrounded past during her childhood. "She constantly cited Janet Jackson every bit an influence," both musically and visually, says Garcia. She often paid homage to Jackson, once introducing a cover of "Billie Jean" by telling the audience, "This little song is by Janet Jackson's blood brother." And the first time she donned one of her bustiers onstage, she was covering Jackson's song "When I Remember of Y'all."
Martin Gomez, Selena'due south mode designer, has said that Diana Ross served as an inspiration for some of the outfits he created for her. This influence is clear in what is arguably Selena's well-nigh well-known ensemble: the imperial jumpsuit she wore to her final televised concert at the Astrodome, in 1995. With its bell-bottoms and midriff cutout, Selena was calling back to the seventies—the era she came up in. Her clunky earrings and bold lipstick synced perfectly with the medley of disco songs with which the band started the prove. Selena was telling the world something about who she was: a Tejana who felt confident well-nigh her roots, and one who best-selling her debt to Blackness forebears.
Selena's outfits oftentimes challenged her family's conservative standards. Her father and manager, Abraham Quintanilla, frequently objected that her aesthetic choices were too revealing. In the 1997 Selena biopic, Abraham and his wife, Marcella, squabble about Selena's now-famous bustiers: "¡Es un bra!" he shouts in defiance.
Every bit a breakout star in a male-dominated genre, Selena always had men weighing in on her image and her career ambitions. When she signed with EMI Latin, the label heads initially rejected her asking to tape an English-language anthology, even though José Behar, the executive who signed her, had presented it to the Quintanillas every bit a distinct possibility. Marketing decisions fell to men, besides. Rubén Cubillos, who designed the embrace for her debut anthology, has said he wanted to play up her "natural" features. Instead, the baroque terminal product featured her walking through what appears to exist a desert, washed up in an outfit that seems nonspecifically exotic. Over the years, as she grew into stardom, Selena seized control of her image and established her own look. By the release of her third album, Entre a Mi Mundo, listeners, as the title suggests, got to enter her world—there, on the cover, is the Selena we know, in a bolero jacket, red lipstick, and gold earrings.
Emboldened by how influential her look became, Selena and Gomez launched a fashion line in the early on nineties and opened Selena Etc., a boutique with branches in Corpus Christi and San Antonio. Though much of Selena'south career "had been tethered to her family unit's dreams," as Garcia notes, style offered her an outlet to make something truly her own. The stores no longer exist today, despite an unending public interest in the details of Selena's life and no shortage of fans who seek to recreate her looks. But perhaps that's because parts of her wait accept since become ubiquitous. "People still describe from that visual linguistic communication," Garcia says.
Today, Selena'southward image is an essential part of American style—something that likely would have seemed unimaginable to her when she was trying to carve out a space for herself in U.S. pop culture. Search "Selena Quintanilla" on the online marketplace Etsy, and more than a yard results for memorabilia—shirts, stickers, primal chains, art—still come, many of them bearing her signature white rose. Celebrities such equally Demi Lovato have shown off their Selena Halloween costumes on social media. And these days, Monica Peralta even so creates custom bustiers by asking for fans who aren't equally confident about their home ec skills. "If Selena were hither, I'1000 certain she would have hopped on the trend of creating a YouTube aqueduct to talk to fans," says Peralta. "If that were the instance, I wouldn't have to be doing it myself."
Frida Garza is a author and editor from El Paso who at present lives in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Guardian US, Jezebel, ELLE.com, and more.
This article originally appeared in the Apr 2021 issue ofTexas Monthlywith the headline "Selena, Fashionista." Subscribe today .
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