“Method dressing” and “subtle” aren’t synonymous, but Selena Gomez has found a way to make it work.
The actor, deep in the throes of her Emilia Pérez press tour, has found a way to pay homage to the film. Billed a “musical crime comedy,” the movie follows Zoe Saldaña as a Mexican lawyer who is enlisted to help a transgender cartel leader (Karla Sofía Gascón) fake her death so that she may live out her life, authentically, as a woman.
For a screening in London, Gomez opted for two pieces from Erdem’s spring 2025 collection, which took inspiration from the famous early 20th-century lesbian couple, novelist Radclyffe Hall and sculptor Una, Lady Troubridge. Gomez and her stylist, Erin Walsh, pulled a feminine black dress with a distinctive 1920s silhouette that was covered in delicate floral embroidery and dripping with rhinestones. (On the runway, the dress was worn over a black lace bralette, which Gomez traded in for a black long-sleeve turtleneck.)
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Over her ultra-femme dress, she wore a more masculine tuxedo jacket, whose lapel transformed into a floor-sweeping fringed scarf. While the jacket featured branch-like rhinestone detailing, the most noteworthy component was the large patch on the cape sleeve: the title page of The Well of Loneliness. “Radclyffe was most famous for writing The Well of Loneliness, which has become a kind of queer, lesbian bible of sorts,” Erdem Moralioglu told Vogue’s Sarah Mower after the presentation. The novel, which chronicles the life of a queer woman named Stephen Gordon, was banned in England after its publication in 1928.
While she’s enjoyed a red carpet run full of LBDs and the occasional princess dress, Gomez played with more masculine style earlier in the day at a Q&A with the cast. For that occasion, she opted for a structured gray double-breasted suit with sharp shoulders, which she wore over a black V-neck.
Method dressing can often come across as trite, but through Gomez’s more esoteric approach, she absolutely nailed the poignant message.