Vogue

VOGUE FIRST LOOK AT THE SPRING/SUMMER 2021 COLLECTIONS EXPRESS YOURSELF GAME-CHANGING ACCESSORIES VOGUE'S BODY SPECLAL Healthier, stronger, fitter The colour-pop bag, bells with benefits, and dancing jewels

I was just always that kid that just did whatever. And my mom always supported that. So I always looked up to Michael because he was never afraid to just be himself. Never tried to be anything that he wasn't. Justin Bieber

Is there a better reflection of a culture than its pop stars? Like nubile little Tesla coils, our chart-toppers are very often both receptors for and projections of our collective energies. And, at 21, Justin Bieber, the kid who grew up playing for cash on the streets of small-town Canada and now plays to sold-out arenas across the world, is basically living like our collective id-if our collective id were jet-skiing on an ocean of money and fame: stepping out with models, befriending moguls, modeling underwear, and hooping it up at the Staples Center with Kanye West. Bieber's Instagrams are perfect little portraits of adolescent appetite paired with the kind of material wealth to accommodate it: whirling around on a Back to the Future-style hoverboard, as he was in a recent video, while aboard a private jet.

But it's not as if Bieber isn't totally unaware of what goes on down here in the mundane world. In March, he threw a Friars Club-style roast of himself on Comedy Central, inviting the likes of Martha Stewart, Kevin Hart, and Snoop Dogg to poke some holes in the very self-serious, straight- faced image he'd been projecting. Look, he gets it. He knows what it looks like to be arrested for racing a Skittle-colored Lamborghini down the streets of Miami Beach. But he's ready to laugh at himself too.

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