Every so often, when I see the paps have captured Taylor Swift at Via Carota/Temple Bar/Emilio’s Ballato in an outfit whose colour scheme might well have been lifted from a Bob Ross sunset, I’m reminded of Elizabeth II.
I’m not suggesting that Her Majesty shared Swift’s penchant for “high heels and crop tops”, nor that Taylor has ever fallen prey to the allure of a fascinator – but the late Queen and the queen of Easter eggs share a fashion MO: dressing for their publics. When, in the late ’90s, the Associated Press asked royal dresser Hardy Amies why Elizabeth R had always worn clothes that felt just shy of dowdy, he replied icily: “The Queen’s attitude is that she must always dress for the occasion, usually for a large mob of middle-class people towards whom she wishes to seem friendly. There’s always something cold and rather cruel about chic clothes, which she wants to avoid.” And, my God, has any British monarch ever drawn quite such “a large mob of middle-class people” as The Eras Tour? I doubt it.
It’s hard to imagine anything Taylor does from this point forward could tarnish her status as an American icon, to deploy one of the fashion industry’s most criminally overused words. But that is precisely what she is. She has been credited, in the course of just a few months, with revitalising such institutions as “the cinema” and “the NFL”. She is the poster girl for the Fourth of July, and a certified billionaire with more number-one albums than any other female artist in history. The very Federal Reserve now has to take note of her whereabouts, while world leaders are reportedly “begging” her to bring The Eras Tour to their respective countries.
In short, she is a genius. And, still, Taylor Swift is not fashionable. This is not subjective; it is a fact, the undeniable truth that looms larger than a Kelce brother behind every headline about her “relatable” style. She wears not fashion, but clothes – the majority of which look like they were bought in a mall where at least one in 13 shoppers is drinking a no-whip caramel frappuccino and carrying an Urban Outfitters bag. If Swift works closely with Joseph Cassell on the styling for her tours, one gets the very real sense that she is dressing herself on a day-to-day basis. Every pair of Khaite jeans is balanced with an H&M top, every shirt from The Row with a Free People skirt. You can imagine her, high in her TriBeCa penthouse with its Liberty-print armchairs and Jo Malone candles, laying out outfits the night before wearing them, probably while FaceTiming Blake Lively and listening to Owl City.
This is no accident. Swift could hire any one of the dozen-odd stylists painstakingly sourcing “effortlessly” put-together looks for the great and the good of Los Angeles and Calabasas. She could, if she so chose, wear nothing but Wardrobe.NYC and old Céline, could replace her Mansur Gavriel Lady with a Birkin, “serve” on the red carpet in archive dresses from Lily et Cie or custom creations from Parisian ateliers. And yet she turned up at the premiere of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour at the AMC Theatre wearing a periwinkle Oscar de la Renta gown that wouldn’t have looked all that out of place at a Midwestern prom in 2007.
And with good reason. If there was ever a point at which Taylor might, in fact, have become a fashion darling, it was the mid-2010s, the original 1989 era, when Swift – by her own admission – decided to change everything about herself, and it blew up, spectacularly, in her face. She may still have been fronting a Keds campaign in 2014, but her “squad” was filled with LVMH ambassadors and models who appeared on Chanel runways. Taylor hosted the Met Gala in Louis Vuitton, performed at Victoria’s Secret Fashion Shows when Victoria’s Secret Fashion Shows still meant something, selected a bold Versace look at the Grammys – and it registered, to many, as a betrayal.
Where was the girl who played a dead body on CSI, who paused her concerts to blow her nose with a Kleenex, who wrote gushing Tumblr posts welcoming in Pumpkin Spice Season? We could not square her with the woman attending an Oscars afterparty in Alexandre Vauthier Haute Couture. Miss Americana had started – through the warped portal of tabloid media – to appear closer to the cheer captain than the girl on the bleachers. By the time she won Album of the Year for 1989 at the Grammys, her image had become – if not exactly chic – then chic adjacent, and by extension, to borrow Amies’s words, “cold” and even “cruel”. This, more than Kanye or anyone in his deeply chaotic orbit, is what truly precipitated her fall from grace, set the #TaylorSwiftIsOverParty in motion.
It would take until 2020, I would argue, for the public to truly forgive Swift for the crime of becoming, however briefly, cool. And while Taylor may have regained her position at the forefront of the public consciousness through sheer dint of God-given talent and ferocious hard work, she has not forgotten the pit of snake emojis we threw her into, will never again be, as she writes in the liner notes to 1989 (Taylor’s Version), as “trusting as a basket of Golden Retriever puppies”. She has learnt, in the most brutal of ways, what we want from her – and she dresses the part, even as she uses her platform to call out the most egregious instances of sexism she faces, the ridiculous double standards to which she’s been held.
“Taylor Swift is the music industry,” Barbara Walters told the world in 2014, and we rolled our eyes. A decade later and Taylor Swift is not just, undeniably, “the music industry”, but she has passed out of the celebrity stratosphere and into another realm entirely, one only truly comparable to royalty in its permanence, in the level of scrutiny it involves. And she is dressing for the part – strumming her guitar in the centre of a Venn diagram of desirability and accessibility, the exact place the Queen strove to occupy throughout her reign, and the Princess of Wales now occupies with an even greater degree of success, alternating her Alexander McQueen gowns and Marks & Spencer knits.
And you know what? Long may Swift reign.
