Well, this feels like a September issue. It’s eye-catching, she looks great and not at all boring, it’s got a real point of view, it feels sincerely editorial, and…you know. You can tell that someone was doing something with it, which honestly is all I ask half of the time. (I guess someone was sort of doing something with Vogue’s September issue but it didn’t work out as well.)
This is (I believe) the subscribers’ cover:
Gorgeous, if maybe a leeeeeeeetle sleepy?? (Sleepy vs sultry can be a tough balance sometimes.)
The press release that came with these photos posits this issue thusly:
Heading into National Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept. 15-Oct. 15), the issue is a celebration of the Latinx community and has been a longtime passion project for Editor in Chief Nina Garcia, the first Latina at the helm of a major American fashion magazine. The issue kicks off with cover star Selena Gomez, who embraced her Latinx heritage in her work in a big way this year, releasing her first Spanish-language album, Revelación and producing and starring in the upcoming biopic In the Shadow of the Mountain, about Peruvian mountain climber Silvia Vásquez-Lavado.
The piece goes on to explain that Vásquez-Lavado is also “the first openly gay woman to scale the Seven Summits,” and this movie sounds rad. (It’s still in pre-production, so no one else has been cast.)
The profile, by Carina Chocano, is excellent. Selena is pretty forthcoming (without oversharing, truly a hard line for a celeb to walk), and the anecdotes about her working with Steve Martin and Martin Short are quite charming. She talks a lot about the philanthropic and activist work she’s been doing, which is not at all insignificant, as well as all the projects she’s got in the hopper (her cooking show sounds sincerely fun). She also talks quite a bit about her mental health, and then says this:
[I]n 2017, she handed the reins (and passwords) of her social media accounts to her assistant. She still provides photos and quotes, but she no longer posts directly herself. “I don’t have it on my phone, so there’s no temptation. I suddenly had to learn how to be with myself. That was annoying, because in the past, I could spend hours looking at other people’s lives. I would find myself down nearly two years in someone’s feed, and then I’d realize, ‘I don’t even know this person!’ Now I get information the proper way. When my friends have something to talk about, they call me and say, ‘Oh, I did this.’ They don’t say, ‘Wait, did you see my post?’ ”
Good for her!
