‘Selena: The Series’ Teases Selena Was a Secret Jane Austen Nerd

Selena: The Series attempts to share some of the most secret, most personal details of Selena Quintanilla Perez (Christian Serratos) short, glittering life. And it sort of does that. It mostly reveals what a taskmaster her father was and how her siblings felt about her rise to Tejano music greatness. However, in the midst of all the soap-y drama, there’s a detail that rocked my vision of the real Selena Quintanilla to my very core. Twice in the series, Selena wears a baby blue crop top with Jane Austen’s portrait on it, suggesting that the real Selena was a hardcore fan of Regency literature.

But is it true? Did Selena really have a Jane Austen crop top and, if so, does that make her one of the legions of us hardcore nerds?

Let’s back up a moment so I can explain why such a seemingly small detail has taken over my brain of late. First of all, I am a massive Selena fan. In my opinion, God has only made three perfect women — the Virgin Mary, St. Brigid of Kildare, and Selena Quintanilla Perez — and I was blessed to live on this earth at the same time as one of them.

You know who I’m also a huge fan of? Jane Austen. The writer revolutionized the English-language novel with her savage social commentary, keen psychological portraits, and dreamy romances. I first became hooked on her storytelling as a child, watching the 1995 film version of Sense & Sensibility and the 1995 Pride & Prejudice mini-series on TV. Naturally, I gobbled up as many adaptations as I could and eventually bathed in her sparkling prose. So many of my close friends are also Jane Austen buffs. It’s like we’re kindred spirits longing for wit, wisdom, and romanticism in our otherwise trash existence.

If Selena: The Series has Selena donning a Jane Austen crop top in the early ’90s, that doesn’t just mean she is — chants — ONE OF US! ONE OF US!, but that she was also attuned to the power of Jane Austen work way before Colin Firth ever dragged himself out of a lake and into a generation’s wet dreams.

So I did the only rational thing I could do. I point blank asked Selena: The Series creator Moisés Zamora if the Jane Austen crop top was based on a real Selena shirt or if the costume department made an original top just for the show.

“I think it was a combination of both. Because what we ended up doing is: we shared about, probably over 3,000 photographs and videos of Selena. They took elements from here and there,” Zamora said, admitting he remembered seeing a similar dress on a 13-year-old Selena, but he couldn’t totally confirm the inspiration for that shirt.

“Some of [the costumes] were perfect replicas of what she wore, and a couple of them were a combination of things that [the costume designers] saw in the pictures, with their own sort of take on it,” Zamora said. “I think that’s one of the things that we really had a lot of fun, being able to discover the evolution of those outfits throughout the series.”

So it sounds like Selena was probably not reading Northanger Abbey on the tour bus, but she might have been. Further clouding matters is the revelation that there is at least one chronologically incorrect tee in the series, so this could be another minor snafu.

However I choose to believe that Selena Quintanilla Perez was a Jane Austen fan. And if she wasn’t, she would have had a Mr. Darcy problem as did we all.

Watch Selena: The Series on Netflix