The last time Selena Gomez spent time in Paris, she decided to dress like a Parisian, because she was in Paris. In other words, Erin Walsh styled the musician in a puff-sleeved, polka-dot dress taken from Jacquemus’s Marie Antoinette-inspired fall-winter 2023 collection. She looked like she might have been studying the 19th-century portraiture of Frédéric Bazille. Or a high school French language textbook.
On that same trip to Paris Fashion Week, Selena Gomez was photographed in an outsized suit with a pair of visible, pale-blue boxers poking above the waistband. Though a more sensible take on the underwear-as-outerwear trend – popularized at Miu Miu, Loewe, and Bottega Veneta – it perhaps laid the groundwork for her most recent (and risqué) Parisian look: a pantsless, crystal-trimmed Valentino suit. Gomez wore that blazer-minidress hybrid with Jimmy Choos and a stone-surfaced Aupen bag. (You can see the picture here.)
All of this reminds me of Anthony Vaccarello’s fall-winter 2023 collection at Louis Vuitton: an abstract send-up of the “French Girl” style. There were cliché pearl necklaces and Carine Roitfeld cigarette pants, but there were also sumptuous dressing gowns and pajama tops made in reference to Parisian people’s (so-called) adulterous tendencies. Might Gomez’s exposed boxers (and hastily-styled pantsless moments) also be paying homage to this most enduring French stereotype?
This story first appeared in British Vogue.
