In late February, 2000, the actress and pop star Jennifer Lopez arrived at the Grammy Awards in a jungle-printed Versace dress made of layers of silk chiffon. Lopez, who was thirty, was nominated for a Grammy in the best dance-track category, with her song “Waiting for Tonight,” off her first album, “On the 6.” She was accompanied on the red carpet by her then boyfriend, Sean (Puff Daddy) Combs, the hip-hop mogul, though the attention went to Lopez and her dress. With a skirt cut up to the crotch and a midriff stretching to below the navel, the dress revealed a full span of leg and an ample swath of bare sternum and breasts, stopping precariously short of revealing the nipples. If the dress didn’t seem vulgar (and it didn’t; it was merely louchely sexy), it was because of the incredible control Lopez seemed to hold over it. How did it stay on? In 2000, I—and, I suspect, many others—hadn’t yet learned of double-sided fashion tape (a simpler time!) and so Lopez appeared to be commanding the gown to stay put with some kind of witchery. She was so visually magnetic, and made so many people want to see her and then see her again, that she famously led to the creation of Google Images.
There was something uncanny about seeing Lopez wear the dress again, or at least a bejewelled, short-sleeved version of it, last September, when she walked the Versace fashion show in Milan. There she was, her appearance a surprise stunt pegged to the show’s finale, her jungle-print emerald chiffon once more cut low at the torso and high at the crotch, her presence commanding the audience to rise to its feet, iPhone cameras held up as one to capture the moment. This time, the magic didn’t emerge so much from the gown’s mysterious clinging powers (the two decades that had passed had opened our eyes to some of fashion’s tricks) but, rather, from Lopez’s own resilience. As Vanessa Friedman noted in the Times, Lopez, now fifty, “looked exactly the same. If anything, more toned and worked out.” Though her appearance was revealed, after the fact, to be part of an advertising tie-in with Google, it seemed more momentous, more meaningful, than a mere corporate gimmick. For a brief moment, time appeared to collapse back into itself. We were in 2019, but we were also, somehow, in 2000. 9/11 hadn’t happened, nor had the Iraq War, nor, for that matter, had George W. Bush, or the recession, or Trump, and it was Lopez—by virtue of her eerily ageless face and body—that allowed us to be within these two moments at once; it was Lopez herself who was magic.
Magazines and Web sites regularly publish articles that promise to reveal the secrets to Lopez’s continued youthfulness (how does she look so good at fifty?), and her ability to maintain a firm-skinned foxiness is a key part of our fascination with her. (I can’t purport to guess how she does this, though I would imagine that a punishing exercise regimen and diet, and access to top dermatologists and perhaps plastic surgeons, form at least part of the answer.) But Lopez’s still-point-of-the-turning-world quality goes beyond her physical appearance. There is something reassuringly unchanging about her presence, too. “Don’t be fooled by the rocks that I got, I’m still, I’m still Jenny from the block,” she sang in 2002, in the first single from her third album, and I recall, at the time, scoffing at the singer’s insistence on her Bronx-girl-next-door bona fides. Yet, over the years, I have come to believe that there is something to this claim. What distinguishes J. Lo., at least as far as her public persona goes, is her stalwart J. Lo.-ness: a warmth, a sass, a strong work ethic, a taking-care-of-business bossiness cut through with a girlish lightness, and, in terms of looks, smooth, honey-hued planes, pleasingly arranged, that suggest a sensual but steely edged femininity. (On Twitter, the culture writer Hunter Harris has recently made an ongoing joke of Lopez’s consistent reliance on nude-colored lipstick: even in her makeup, J. Lo. can’t be anything but J. Lo.)
At the Super Bowl LIV halftime show, on Sunday, in Miami, Lopez was set to take the stage alongside Shakira, the Colombian pop star, who is forty-three, and who broke into the American market in the early two-thousands, not long after Lopez released “On the 6.” Last year, Cardi B and Rihanna, who is signed to Jay-Z’s Roc Nation label, refused to perform at the Super Bowl, to object the N.F.L.’s treatment of the quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who was shunned by the league after he insisted on taking the knee during the national anthem, as a protest against police brutality. (Jay-Z has also criticized the N.F.L. in the past.) Since then, however, Roc Nation, which counts Shakira as a client, has signed a deal with the N.F.L., which included advising the league on the halftime show and participating in its social-justice initiative Inspire Change—a deal that drew some criticism for its potential defanging of protest against the league, but that smoothed the way for Shakira’s performance. In the days leading up to the event, some suggested that Lopez, as the bigger star, should have headlined the halftime show on her own. (“Let’s be real: La Lopez has been in the midst of a major moment,” the New York Post wrote. “Sorry, Shaki, but Jenny doesn’t need you on her block.”) When the flame-haired Shakira took the stage, though, in a red sparkly minidress and matching boots, supported by a troupe of lockstepping female dancers, to perform a medley of some of her greatest hits (she was joined, at one point, by the Puerto Rican reggaetón star Bad Bunny, who wore a crystal-strewn silver-toned coat and suit), she looked and sounded great, moving fleetly between monster bangers including “Whenever, Wherever,” “Hips Don’t Lie,” and “I Like It Like That.” She played a glittery guitar, manipulated a thick length of rope during a belly-dance-inflected routine, crowd-surfed, and waggled her tongue at the camera.
Still, it was Lopez’s night. After Shakira’s six-minute set, she appeared, clinging to an Empire State Building-like spire in a skintight grommet-studded one-piece black leather suit, which somehow managed to include a thong as well as boots. She began her medley with “Jenny from the Block” (“We from the Bronx, New York!”), later moving on to “Get Right.” Changing into a corset-like contraption the texture of broken glass, she tore into “Waiting for Tonight,” performing some unbelievably agile feats of athleticism on a stripper pole. The Colombian reggaetón star J Balvin joined for a snippet of the Major Lazer hit “Que Calor,” which then blended into “Love Don’t Cost a Thing.” Later, in a moment rife with political overtones, Lopez, alongside a choir of children that included her eleven-year-old daughter, Emme, sang a rendition of “Let’s Get Loud,” mixed with a few bars from “Born in the U.S.A.,” while wearing a feathered cape that bore the American flag on one side and the Puerto Rican flag on the other. Lopez’s voice isn’t her strongest asset, and she spent minutes at a time dancing rather than singing, but her showmanship was unparalleled. The pace was furious, and the movements onstage resembled, at times, the gruelling, near-apocalyptic cheerleading routines recently familiarized by the Netflix documentary series “Cheer,” if the nineteen-year-olds of Navarro College were fifty-year-old triple-threat multimillionaires. Lopez was still here, and she was spectacular.
Last year, in the all-women ensemble hit “Hustlers,” Lopez played a den-mother stripper and con woman named Ramona Vega. She didn’t get an Oscar nod for the role, and her fans were furious, but the decision made some sense to me: in Ramona, Lopez wasn’t so much creating a new character as embodying the most iconic version of J. Lo. In one memorable scene, the Lorde song “Royals” plays as Ramona walks down a city street, in tight jeans and a black velvet Juicy Couture hoodie emblazoned with a bejewelled crown, her caramel hair flowing from beneath her hood. “How you doin’, girl?” she hails a passerby, genially. Then, she draws cash out of a bodega A.T.M., turns around, and immediately gets busted by the Feds. Even as she puts her hands up and allows a wad of bills to fly from her palm, her demeanor is, still, equal parts queen and homegirl. The movie’s time line begins in 2007, and goes on until the mid twenty-tens, and, as in the case of the Versace dress, there is something comforting in having Lopez hand-hold us from the pre-2008 high times through the crisis of the recession and beyond—a journey that does not seem to have left its marks on the star. Lopez continues to age, and it will eventually have an effect on her appearance and stamina, but for now she seems to be an exception to the rules that the rest of us live by. Watching her in movies or in music videos, walking the runway or performing in the Super Bowl halftime show, we can buy into the fantasy that we, too, might move frictionlessly over the course of time, affecting our surroundings without being, in turn, affected by them.
