How Selena Gomez’s Stylist Channels Her Body Confidence Into Major Fashion Moments

Has anyone else noticed that Selena Gomez’s looks have been giving off a certain hot-girl-shit energy lately? The bright red dresses on the red carpet. The va-va-va-voom corset tops. The sheer everything. According to her stylist, Erin Walsh, that’s not an accident.

Gomez has been vocal about body positivity and coming to accept and love her body as it changes. In January the actor posted then-and-now pictures of herself in a bathing suit—one photo shows Gomez wearing an animal-print bikini a few years ago, and the other, more recent photo shows her in a black-and-white suit as she looks now.

“Today I realized I will never look like this again,” she wrote over the first photo, continuing, “I'm not perfect but I am proud to be who I am. Sometimes I forget it's okay to be me.”

Gomez began working with Walsh, the celebrity stylist responsible for Anne Hathaway’s “Anneaissance,” in 2023. Walsh’s approach to style is all about embracing oneself, and Gomez’s body positivity is reflected in her outfits, which are calculated to best show off her, ahem, assets.

“I feel like for whether you are Selena or whether you are, you know, stay-at-home mom in Ohio, there are hacks to the system like corsets, for example, or even structural pieces,” Walsh, who has partnered with Rakuten for New York Fashion Week, tells Glamour. “They make you feel held.”

She continues: “The only way that you're gonna highlight your best features is when you, number one, acknowledge what you feel vulnerable about and what makes you a little bit nervous. And then by looking at that you know how to support it, how to hold it.”

When you feel literally supported by your clothes in this way, says Walsh, you then feel empowered.

Take the extra-spicy red Oscar de la Renta dress Selena Gomez wore to the VMAs in September of 2023. “That look was major because—and I spoke with Selena about this—she felt great,” Walsh says. “She felt like the best version of herself.” Walsh notes that the color red can help bring out a person’s confidence simply due to our own associations with that color.

“I believe that what you wear is the ultimate tool to live as your best self, to embody the best version of yourself,” says Walsh. “I’ve really been examining the tools that enlighten that. So whether that’s like the feng shui of color or proportion.”

When working with clients, Walsh says she first thinks about how the client wants to feel.

“And then the look comes around it,” she says. “Like, the look becomes sort of incidental.”

Gomez’s VMAs dress, Walsh says, is a great example: “As a stylist, you can really see when things click that way. And especially with people who happen to be very famous, you feel that click in a bigger way because the world is watching.”

This spirit is behind Walsh’s NYFW collaboration with Rakuten, in which she curated a series of shoppable, runway-inspired looks for an extra 10% cash back on the platform. She says that the best trends—such as the color red—are timeless and come together organically.

“Yes, be aware of what is trendy, but how does that make you feel?” she says. “Even when you look at street-style trends or mixing high and low, athletic with more structured pieces, people like that because they feel comfortable, but they look elevated. So it's those dichotomies in the trends that you wanna highlight.”

At the end of the day, Walsh says she loves to see “women owning their bodies.”

“I think that's what empowerment is,” she says. “It's owning all that you are the things that you feel nervous about and the things that you feel great about. And when you put all that together in a way that makes you feel held…that's when I think that's when you can shine.”

Originally Appeared on Glamour