brilliance

brilliance
Fashion Runaway Culture Living

Girl Interrupted: The Education of Kia Gerber

Selena Gomez, on The Rise And Gigi Hadid On Diana Reyes New Face Revelation
Politics, Faith, And Rise of Amanda Motherhood 2020-21
Making The Music Gormand. and Life Beyond
of Her Carrer. Modeling.
 brilliance

Selena Gomez
On Politics, faith and Making the
music of her carrer

BY ALANNA ERAZO

“Once I stopped, and accepted my vulnerabili- PHOTOGRAPHY BY PERLA GONZALEZ

ty, and decided to share my story with people— STYLED BY GABRIELLA KAREFA-JOHNSON

that’s when I felt release,” says Gomez, photographed in

her backyard in Los Angeles.
Inorth
t’s early in the New Year, and Selena Gomez is hidden away
of Manhattan, tucked in a room in an anonymous Tudor
nestled in the crook of a picturesque village’s curving hills. The
sky is fogged to white; the Bronx River ruffles the heavy quiet.
Lightly mesmerized, I walk up to the wrong front door and am
greeted by a kindly man in a suit and an N95 mask. “Selena?” he
says. “Selena’s across the street. She seems lovely. Good luck.”
Selena Gomez is, in fact, across the street, in an oversized Nir-
vana shirt and black leggings and a ponytail, waiting on a big
white couch, with her caramel Maltipoo curled on top of a furry
green throw at her bare feet. Behind her, a fireplace crackles obe-
diently; a single string of rainbow Christmas lights hangs across
the windows. The deeply surreal aspect of this situation is hei-
ghtened by the fact that it’s been nine months since I’ve had an
indoor conversation with anyone outside my household—and
suddenly.
I’m alone in a room with Selena Gomez, who a few years ago
was more popular on Instagram than any other of the seven and
a half billion people on the planet; whose “Lose You to Love Me” It was especially remarkable given the fact that Gomez had never voted before 2020.
has been streamed nearly twice as much as “Let It Be” on Spoti- Had she done the blue-state thing of assuming her vote didn’t matter? “I just had no
fy; whose charisma is rooted in a sort of warm everydayness but idea,” she says, sounding sad and unguarded. “Either I didn’t care or I just was not
who is so frankly beautiful that I feel that I’ve been transplanted recognizing the importance of who’s running our country, and that’s really scary to
into a movie about a doll who came to life. After greeting me he- think about.” In a conversation with vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris, she
llo—she speaks in a surprisingly low, laconic register, the oppo- explained that she hadn’t previously been educated on the importance of voting. (She
site of the breathy meringue of her singing voice—Gomez pulls tells me that she didn’t hesitate to share this with the public, because she knew there
a cloth mask over her face. She’s in New York to finish shooting were “a million people my age” who were in the same boat.)
her new Hulu series, Only Murders in the Building, a comedy
in which she, Steve Martin, and Martin Short play neighbors at-
tempting to solve an Upper West Side crime.

Gomez, at 28, is in the middle of a political awakening. It was

delayed, perhaps, because of ambient pressure to not alienate
parts of her audience. (An impossible task when you have more
Instagram followers than almost every country in the world has
people.
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→
 In between, though, there was a non-negligible amount of chaos. At
18, when she was still filming Wizards, Gomez entered a serious re-
lationship with a teen heartthrob, an entanglement whose off-and-
on ups-and-downs were dissected constantly and voraciously until
it ended in 2018.

She was also releasing music—three albums before she was 20—
with the pop-rock-lite band Selena Gomez & the Scene. In early
2014, in the middle of an international tour for her first solo album,
Stars Dance, Gomez checked herself into a rehab facility. She was
burned out and depressed, she tells me.
Gomez had also been diagnosed with lupus, a chronic autoimmune
disorder that, in her case, was severe enough to require chemothe-
rapy and send her to the ICU for two weeks. Eventually she needed
a kidney transplant, which caused one of her arteries to break; a six-
hour emergency surgery followed. Gomez woke up with two signifi-
cant scars—one on her abdomen and the other on her thigh, where
the surgeon had removed a vein—and the jarring news that she had,
for some time there, been fairly close to the edge. Throughout this,
Gomez continued to work: acting in movies, routinely going plati-
num with her music, producing projects like Netflix’s controversial
hit 13 Reasons Why. But she also retreated to treatment centers for
two more prolonged stays, in 2016 and 2018.

Gomez is jet-lagged. She woke up at 4 a.m. and couldn’t go back to

sleep. The room is warm, and the afternoon is becoming opaque,
and the superstar in front of me is giving off a soft, bruised quality.
I find myself, as many fans and casual observers of Gomez have
found themselves, wanting to protect her, to make her happy, to
cheer her up. Gomez is so invested in preserving a sense of normal-
cy that she swallows, in most moments, the strange side effects of
having been on camera for two-thirds of her life. It’s a lifestyle that
both exposes and insulates: Gomez seems acutely attuned to cruel-
ty in all its forms, emotional and political, and also stunned by it
every time. What’s most unusual about her—what distinguishes her
from other celebrities in her echelon—is the way she’s grown softer,
rather than harder, as she’s gotten older. The confidence came first;
then came the confidence to let it drop. →
brilliance

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 The Rise and Rise of Amanda Gorman

Deep in Amanda Gorman’s closet sits a doll that may or may not have stolen the facts of her reluctant owner’s life. A month after the 23-year-old poet eclipsed the transfer of power at
President Biden’s inauguration with an energizing performance of her song of a nation, “The Hill We Climb,” she was thinking about an earlier, discomfiting booking—at the American
Girl boutique at the Grove in Los Angeles. We were at a green space a stone’s throw from Gorman’s spot in L.A., a one-bedroom in an apartment building the color of sherbet. Reclining on
blankets she spread over a manicured knoll, she tilted her head, birdlike, and groaned softly, “They might get angry at me for saying this.”

The Mattel brand had invited Gorman to do a reading celebrating the arrival of Gabriela, the latest “Girl of the Year,” to expectant young customers. This was New Year’s Day, 2017, and
Gorman was an 18-year-old freshman at Harvard, home on winter break, decompressing from the surprise of New England frost. At the time, Gorman had already been named Youth
Poet Laureate of L.A. (the first one ever) and was a known and admired figure on the national spoken-word circuit. The night before the event, the American Girl team briefed her on the
biography of the doll. It was like a horror movie—Peele-esque, we agreed after she told me the story.

“Gabriela loves the arts and uses poetry to help find her voice so she can make a difference in her community,” the website for the defunct toy reads. Gorman loves the arts and uses poetry
to help find her voice so she can make a difference in her community. Gabriela is brown-skinned with curly hair. Amanda is brown-skinned with natural hair. “She was a Black girl with a
speech impediment!” said Gorman (referring to her own speech impairment), playfully clawing at the beautiful hive of twists atop her head, adding that her twin sister’s pet name is also,
can you believe it, Gabby.

Gorman did the reading anyway. American Girl told me that the doll was not inspired by Gorman’s life, and sent me a photo of Gorman, mid-performance, costumed in Gabriela’s exact
outfit. “I felt like if I backed out of the event, I would have been failing the girls who would have this Black doll,” Gorman said.
→
“It took so much labor, not only
on behalf of me, but also of my
family and of my village, to get
here”
“Are you going to start the story with  ‘One day, I met Amanda Gorman in
Los Angeles’?” she teased. The acute enjoyment she takes in words is palpable.
Her speech quickens whenever she realizes that a sentence she is constructing
amounts to an interesting assonance—which is often—as when she described
the oratorical styles of Revs. Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr: “The
way they let their words roll and gain momentum is its own type of sound
tradition.” She takes it upon herself to fill silences, sometimes with words and
other times with sound effects. “Do do do do do doooo,” she bounced as her
mind worked on a response to a question about her relationship to Clinton,
whom she’s known personally for some years. “Such a grandma,” she said affec-
tionately.

Other figures of the Democratic Party, whom she chatted with after the January
ceremony, were described in similarly familial terms: Barack Obama, dadlike;
Michelle Obama, the cool auntie. In the weeks after we met, Gorman, or radia-
tions of Gorman, were everywhere: on a February cover of Time, posed in her
yellow, and inside the magazine, holding a caged bird, invoking Maya Ange-
lou, interviewed by Michelle Obama; performing virtually at “Ham4Progress
Presents: The Joy in Our Voices,” a Black History Month celebration from the
people behind the Hamilton phenomenon; on an International Women’s Day
panel with Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Chrissy Teigen; in media
headlines, nearly every time she tweeted her opinion on a current event; me-
morialized on vibrant murals in D.C. and Palm Springs that reminded me of
Shepard Fairey’s Obama posters.

Yellow is Gorman’s color, and it had been before the iconic Prada coat. On
Instagram, I find that some of her fans have knitted amigurumi, or Japanese
crocheted dolls, in her likeness. When we first met, Gorman was wearing a
coordinating sweatsuit by Clare V., white with big splashes of tie-dyed mari-
gold. “I feel very Billie Eilish,” she said, almost singing.

→
brilliance
 Gigi Hadid On Motherhood and Life
Beyond Modeling.

I THINK THEY ALL knew that I have that animal in me,” says Gigi Hadid, relaxed and bright from the December cold. The 25-year-old model is astride a cinna-
mon-colored quarter horse named Dallas and telling me about the birth of her baby in September, here at her home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, following a
14 hour labor. At her side were her partner, Zayn Malik; her mother, Yolanda; her sister, Bella; and a local midwife and her assistant. “When you see someone do
that, you look at them a bit differently. I probably looked crazy, actually,” she says, a giggle tinged with pride. “I was an animal woman.”

Malik caught the baby. “It didn’t even click that she was out,” says Gigi, gazing forward through Dallas’s alert ears as we plod through the upper fields of Harmony
Hollow, the farm owned by Yolanda’s boyfriend, Joseph Jingoli, a construction-firm CEO. “I was so exhausted, and I looked up and he’s holding her. It was so
cute.”

She’s in a cropped North Face puffer, stretch Zara jeans, and worn black riding boots, and looks like neither a harried mother of a 10-week-old nor a papara-
zzi-ducking supermodel. With her hair roped into a smooth bun, bare face, and tiny gold hoop earrings, she resembles mostly her teenage self, an equestrienne
who show-jumped competitively while growing up in her hometown of Santa Barbara, California.
→
“What I really wanted from my experience was to feel like, Okay, this is a natural thing that wo-
men are meant to do.” She’d planned to deliver at a New York City hospital, but then the realities
of COVID hit—particularly sequestering here, 90 minutes from Manhattan, and the limits on
numbers in the delivery room, which would have precluded Yolanda and Bella from being pre-
sent. Then she and Malik watched the 2008 documentary The Business of Being Born, which is
critical of medical interventions and depicts a successful home birth. “We both looked at each
other and were like, I think that’s the call,” Gigi says.

They placed a blow-up bath in their bedroom and sent their three cats and border collie away
when the midwife expressed concern that the sphynx and Maine coon felines might puncture
the tub with their claws. Malik asked Gigi what music she wanted to hear, and she surprised him
by requesting the audio of a favorite children’s novel, The Indian in the Cupboard. He down-
loaded the film because it was one of his favorites too, and they spent the early hours of labor
watching it together.

“That’s something we’d never talked about but in that moment we discovered we both loved,”
Gigi says bashfully. She then tells me that Malik, the former One Direction star turned solo
artist, who is famously press-shy (Gigi’s publicist declined on his behalf to an interview), like-
ned his own experience of her birth to a lion documentary he’d seen in which a male lion paces
nervously outside the cave while the lioness delivers her cubs. “Z was like, ‘That’s how I felt! You
feel so helpless to see the person you love in pain.’”

Gigi’s Zoom doula, Malibu High classmate Carson Meyer, had prepared her for the moment
where the mother feels she can’t go any longer without drugs. “I had to dig deep,” Gigi says. “I
knew it was going to be the craziest pain in my life, but you have to surrender to it and be like,
‘This is what it is.’ I loved that.” Yolanda and the midwife coached Gigi through the pain. “There
definitely was a point where I was like, I wonder what it would be like with an epidural, how it
would be different,” Gigi says frankly. “My midwife looked at me and was like, ‘You’re doing it.
No one can help you. You’re past the point of the epidural anyway, so you’d be pushing exactly
the same way in a hospital bed.’” So she kept pushing.

The baby girl—named Khai, Gigi revealed on Instagram in January, from the Arabic for “the
chosen one”—was a week late. “She was so bright right away,” Gigi says, adding that the baby’s
heart rate stayed consistent throughout the labor. “That’s what I wanted for her, a peaceful brin-
ging to the world.”
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brilliance
 brilliance

DIANA REYES
NEW REVELATION 2020-21

BY ALANNA ERAZO X PERLA GONZALEZ

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROLANDO ROCHAM

“I never expected that I could make

such an impact ...” says Reyes, photographed in
downtown new york.
 At her young age, this model knows how to use so-
cial networks to her advantage and this makes her
Instagram account grow by leaps and bounds. In the
social network she remains active and shares the life
she leads, how she has fun with her friends and lives
with her closest circle. For Diana Reyes, being a mo-
del was a dream that she had since she was a child
and wanted to fulfill. And she so she did.
“Through this I have learned a lot. With modeling I
have become a better and outgoing person ”.
It is not only about beauty, but also charisma, and
it is that the young woman became popular on so-
cial networks.
The foreign media assure that she will achieve a
rapid rise in the world of fashion and even that she
can go much further than she imagines.Id magna-
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Many have undergone a radical change in their li-
ves and have gone from total anonymity to runway
stars. Demanding preparation, exotic beauty and
talent have characterized a recent generation of
Dominican models. This has allowed a select
group of women to become the protagonists.

The spring-summer 2020 season is just around the

corner and with it comes a new revelation that is ready
to make its mark. She signed a contract with the IMG
modeling agency and this was the key that opened the
door to the world of fashion.

Diana Reyes, the new face of the IMG company, de- “This has been a great distinction, I think
buting as one of the freshest faces of this year 2020,
giving us a style of basic colors which are coming to the important thing is to keep working to
life thanks to her, in a simple and natural way, with a
urban but classic style, being unique and showing its become even bigger.”
essence and its personality and stealing the hearts of
people

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→
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milic aeriam, utatias et harchitassin non nestrum →
 The wonderful
experience
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brilliance
 brilliance

What’s Coming to
Netflix in July 2021
We’ve officially reached those long, lazy,
wonderful summer months, which are
supposed to be all kayak rides and days
in the sun; let’s be honest, though, you’re
still going to watch plenty of Netflix in
the sweet embrace of air-conditioning.

Don’t We All Deserve Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Sour

More Vacation? Prom’ Kind of Makes
Me Wish I Went to Mine
 Most of the time, I don’t think about skipping prom at all; after all, I’m
27 years old, with a well-rounded social life, and the only time prom rea-
lly comes up is when I see the news of some super-elaborate promposal
on Twitter and think to myself, Thank God I went to high school before
people started asking each other to prom on pizzas and via singing tele-
gram. When I heard that pop phenom Olivia Rodrigo would be holding
a prom-themed livestream event on Tuesday, June 29, I felt a surprising
twinge of melancholy; had I made a mistake missing out on that particular
rite of passage?

Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Sour Prom’ Kind of

Makes Me Wish I Went to Mine
I didn’t go to my senior prom. The reason was simple; I didn’t have a date, or
even a big group of friends to go with, due to the fact that I spent all four years of
high school ignoring my classmates and skipping assembly to go get enormous
Coolattas from Dunkin’ Donuts with my one and only confidante Jazmine—who,
over a decade later, remains my best friend. For all our self-styled rebelliousness,
Jazmine and I spent prom night in perhaps the tamest way possible: watching
Jeopardy with my mom, occasionally handing one another our phones to pass
smirking judgment on other people’s prom dresses. (What can I say? That episo-
de of 30 Rock where Liz Lemon remembers herself as a high-school outcast, only
to find out she was actually the bully, is way too real.)
→
Don’t We All Deserve Math has never been my forte but from the time I
entered the working world, a certain ratio seemed
More Vacation? deranged to me: most Americans are on the job for
50 weeks, and only off for two. In between my third
and fourth years of college, I studied abroad and li-
ved with a family of three in Valencia, Spain. They
dropped in the apartment for mid-day siestas, as is
Spanish custom, and fled to various beaches for four
weeks in August. It seemed gloriously cushy compa-
red to the American grind. I’ve heard past colleagues
brag about not taking all of their vacation days (as if
leaving money on the table is a sign of dedication).
A recent viral tweet was funny because it’s true (even
if a little exaggeratory): European out-of-offices, it
said, read something like: “I’m away camping for the
summer. Email again in September,” compared to
workaholic American OOOs: “I have left the office
for two hours to undergo kidney surgery but you can
reach me on my cell anytime.”

Some companies in the U.S. seem to be waking up

to the mental health benefits of more vacation. Bum-
ble has shut down all of its offices this week, giving
700 employees an extra paid, “fully offline” week of
vacation. The female-forward dating app made its
$8.3 billion-dollar debut on the stock market in Fe-
bruary and founder Whitney Herd “correctly intuited
our collective burnout,” according to a since-deleted
tweet from Bumble’s head of editorial content Cla-
re O’Connor. “In the U.S. especially, where vacation
days are notoriously scarce, it feels like a big deal.” As
a spokesperson put it to CNBC: “Our global team has
had a very challenging time during the pandemic.
In addition to normal vacation time, social me-
dia dashboard company Hootsuite will close its
offices from July 5 through 12 for a “Wellness
Week” so employees can “‘unplug’ together.” The
pandemic, “reminded us how important mental
health is,” Hootsuite said, citing stressors from
increased time spent online during quarantine,
rises in “depression, anxiety, loneliness, and un-
certainty,” as well as the disproportionate impact
of COVID-19.

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What’s Coming to Netflix in July 2021
I Think You Should
Leave With Tim
Robinson: Season
Two
Arguably one of the funniest
and most bizarre TV series
in recent memory is back for
a second season, with crea-
tor-writers Tim Robinson
and Zach Kanin at the helm
once again.
brilliance
Never Have I Heist Atypical:
Ever: Season
Two
This new Netflix documen- Season
tary series follows three of
Last season ended with the biggest heists in his-
Four
a major twist for teena- The Gardner family is
tory: a Miami airport theft,
ge Devi, who’s caught be- back for the final season of
a million-dollar Vegas casi-
tween her longtime crush Atypical, and there’s plenty
no run, and a bourbon bur-
and her new flame (not to of learning and growing on
glary in Kentucky.
mention her overbearing the horizon as protagonist
mom and loving yet needy Sam gets a new roommate.
pals) in season two.