Selena On Fire

In her 25 years, Selena Gomez has experienced more than most. Now she’s grown up, in love, and at the top of her game

- Laura Brown

Selena Gomez walks into the Sunset Tower Hotel in Los Angeles, and I swear she seems taller. She’s wearing Free People stripes and has heels on, of course—girl didn’t get to 123 million– plus Instagram followers without looking cute. But it’s more subtle than that. She looks more...grown.

She orders a beet salad (“I’m treating myself later. My grandparents and I are getting Texas-style BBQ,” she says, acknowledging her meager order with a what-can-you-do shrug). “I actually lived at the Sunset Tower for three months,” she explains, adding matter-of-factly, “I was going through a really hard time in my life and decided to live here.”

I last interviewed Gomez four years ago for another magazine. She had taken me to a Hooters in the Valley, where she was a regular. She ordered fried pickles. She had long hair, wore a beanie, and spilled ketchup on her flannel shirt. We shot a little video together, and she brought a bag of clothes from home, including items from her Dream Out Loud collection for Kmart.

That was, of course, then. Tossed into a perfect storm of celebrity and social media, Gomez has faced the wave and surfed it. Her “bag of clothes from home” has evolved into contracts with Pantene and Coach; Hooters is now the Sunset Tower. This summer she’s been releasing, drop by Instagrammable drop, new music anticipated with a breathlessness on the level afforded to Adele. And, of course, her first public boyfriend, Justin Bieber, is history. (At the time of our interview, she’s six months into a relationship with Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd.)