Well done Jen!

This article is published in number 7 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until February 15, 2022

The question I have always asked myself is one. And the subject in question has always been one: Jennifer Lopezdivas diva, analog-digital entrepreneur before it was cool (or at least usual), a film-record-brand-money grinder like no other. The question, I said, is precisely: as does JLo, who evidently is not a human like us, doing all the things she does and being, at least apparently, so serene? And to do more and more: the things (and the effects) that she produces have increased exponentially over time.

The girl from the Bronx who took the number 6 line of the New York subway (hence, as you know, the title of the first album: On the 6) to go to work in Manhattan; the local actress (the Latin cult Selena) who is then reborn as a star – but never really taken seriously by the film industry – with Out of Sight by Steven Soderbergh; the pop star who makes a bang late, at thirty, today even more than then it would be unthinkable, but with that charisma and those moves of the pelvis in the video clip of If You Had My Love putting all the teen colleagues back at their desk (sorry, Britney). Here, the girl then actress then pop star is today the woman who, in the season in which she turned fifty (it was 2019), ringed, in no particular order: a Super Bowl pyrotechnic, to demonstrate that solidarity between chicas (the other was Shakira) really exists; a quasi-nomination for an Oscar for the film that finally consecrated her as a “real” actress (ie The Wall Street girls: the very indignant social networks have come down for the lack of recognition by the Academy, and we know that the social indignation is what it is nowadays, so it is as if that candidacy had arrived); a reload of the legendary jungle dress of Versace, to confirm that only she could before and only she can now; a pre-pandemic global tour entitled It’s My Party, poetic and programmatic manifesto.

Jennifer is today the woman who tears apart the very idea of ageismbecause she is the one who bends time, not the other way around. She is the woman who has become a national monument, a paradigm of integration and inclusion without proclamations, only through symbols: This Land Is Your Land, sang during President Biden’s inauguration ceremony, and that was enough. It is the very resolute woman (would anyone dare to question it?) Who transforms the concept previously commonly known as “heated soup” into the myth, however real, of the “second chance”, the backbone of her career: I am talking about the Bennifers, that is the Lopez couple / Affleck also reloaded after the triumphs (the public obscene acts of the video of Jenny from the Block) and the thuds (the cinematic flop of Extreme lovein the original the spernacchiatissimo Lilies) of the early 2000s. But we will return to this later.

The initial question remained open: how does JLo do everything while keeping the serenity intact? I turn it directly to her, appeared on Zoom on a (for me) winter evening. Long honey-colored hair extensions, a powder dress lying well on the fuchsia sequin sofa, she quietly smiles and gives me the best possible answers: “There are many secrets: the first is to have a good team of people to help you, which over the years I have I am built ». Struck and sunk by this test of honesty, I elegantly let myself be put back in my place.

Then comes the First Lesson of JLo, pitted with that usual almost Siddhartian serenity …

(The full article on Vanity Fair on newsstands)

Photo: Dan Jackson
Service: Mobolaji Dawodu

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