Friends Like These

Selena Gomez and Puma put out a sports collection, and what caught me was that she didn’t just slap her name on some existing designs. She brought in her friends—Dana Veraldi, Katie McCurdy, Connar Franklin, Raquelle Stevens, Courtney Barry, Caroline Franklin, Theresa Marie Mingus. People she actually knows.

There’s something that’s happened to celebrity collaborations where they’ve become so divorced from anything genuine that when one has real people behind it, it stands out. The SG Runner sneaker she designed—I don’t know if it’s any good, never saw it in person—but her friends being part of building it matters more than the shoe itself.

She said something in the press that stuck: Without them I wouldn’t be where I am today. That’s not the kind of thing you’d normally expect from a celebrity partnership. The assumption in most collaborations is that the celebrity is the whole draw, that everyone else is interchangeable. Seeing someone credit the people who matter, building something around that rather than in spite of it, felt different.

I don’t care if the collection was good. What interested me was the architecture of it: friendship at the center, not at the edges. Not friendship as theme, but people with names who helped build the thing. That was the whole point.