The Squad as Raw Material
Think about what Selena Gomez has been through in public—the lupus diagnosis, the kidney transplant, the mental health hospitalizations, the years of sustained media cruelty about her body and her relationships—and then look at a sportswear collection called the Strong Girl Collection and decide whether that name is marketing language or something more personal. I think it’s the latter, or at least it started there.
The Puma collaboration produced activewear in black, red, and white, built around a sneaker Selena designed herself called the SG Runner. The aesthetic is clean and unshowy—nothing that announces itself aggressively, nothing that needs to be explained to be worn. You could run in it, do yoga in it, wear it without it being a statement about anything, which is actually a harder design problem to solve than it sounds.
What distinguishes this from the usual celebrity-branded sportswear is the role her friends played in it. Dana Veraldi, Katie McCurdy, Connar Franklin, Raquelle Stevens, Courtney Barry, Caroline Franklin, Theresa Mingus—these are the women who’ve been photographed outside hospitals with her, who’ve shown up consistently through every round of crisis and recovery. She brought them into the creative process and made them part of the collection’s foundation. Without them, I wouldn’t be where I am today,
she said, which in Selena’s case carries more weight than that sentence usually does when celebrities say it.
The best celebrity collaborations are the ones where you can feel the person’s actual preferences pushing back against the brand’s commercial instincts. The SG Runner looks like something Selena would actually wear, not something handed to her with her name already attached. Whether or not that’s literally true, the impression matters. It’s the difference between a product and an object.
Sportswear design is underrated as a discipline. The constraint—it has to function, hold up, move with a body—forces a kind of honesty that fashion doesn’t always require. A bad sneaker is immediately apparent in a way a bad runway coat isn’t. The SG Runner lands on the right side of that judgment.