It is a complete coincidence that Selena Gomez wore head-to-toe pink less than 48 hours after Reese Witherspoon revealed a TV offshoot of Legally Blonde is in the works. But it was, perhaps, an act of kismet. The actor-musician was attending her make-up line’s latest product launch—a luminous powder blush in lemonade pink–when she arrived at Studio 525 in New York, dressed as a sort of 2024 iteration of Elle Woods.
Much of that is because the color pink–Woods’s sentimental calling card–has, in a post-Barbie world, become shorthand for “Look, I am promoting this thing you can purchase.” It is the uniform of the celebrity marketeer and Gomez compounded that role in a shirt dress, a double-breasted trench and bow-festooned pumps, all pink and all from Versace. It makes me think of something that Tiqqun–a French collective of authors and activists–anticipated in 1999: “In a near and predictable future, all of the surplus value of the capitalist regime will be produced by young girls.”
The co-op added: “Every young girl is an automatic, standard converter of existence into market value,” which would explain the success that Hailey Bieber experienced when she coined the term “Strawberry Girl Summer” to coincide with the launch of Rhode’s Strawberry Glaze Lip Peptide Treatment in August 2023. Elle Woods was not a girl, but it was her girly attributes–the pink, the chihuahua, the guileless optimism of a Bel Air princess–that triumphed over the buttoned-up frumps she encountered at Harvard. Selena Gomez–the Disney girl turned businesswoman who has never met a grosgrain ribbon she didn’t immediately tie into a ponytail–seems to have taken a thing or two from Woods’s candied approach to boardroom excellence.
