Taylor Swift is a master of self-invention. It’s been said before, but she’s a success by design: behind the girl-next-door persona that’s so incredibly easy to relate to (yeah! Eff that guy and his precious truck, we’ll do better), there’s a whole machine of thought that goes into her image. Since she burst onto the scene in 2006, we’ve lived through multiple incarnations, watching her style evolve at every big turning point in her career.
Country princess, pop star, retro babe, fashun lover: everyone’s got their personal Swift era preference. Nowhere better is each image so succinctly summed up than the look that comes with a new album drop. So, with Reputation’s cover reveal and a rumored new single on the way, we’re taking a stroll back through her greatest beauty hits—and analyzing what this new era could signal.
2006 to 2007
PHOTO: Getty Images
Our first introduction to Swift as a Nashville teen, her country era was strongly, strongly boilerplate princess-themed. Innocence was the name of the game on her eponymously named album, alongside songs like “Teardrops on My Guitar” (DREW!), “Picture to Burn” (still a banger), and “Our Song.” With her naturally curly hair and love for the maximum amount of glitter on both her eyeshadow and dresses, it was very much a “this girl believes in fairytales and romance” moment, and one that both made her approachable to the middle school girl demo, and set her apart from the rest of the country music scene.
2008 to 2011
PHOTO: Getty Images
“You Belong With Me” hit in 2008, and who could forget Swift pulling a Parent Trap and playing both the girl next door and the villainous popular girl. Truly, this woman contains multitudes—but the greatest trick of all was selling the idea that Swift was just an average girl looking for love. The sparkles got toned down, and while her curls were still going strong, they started to move into a more styled, barrel curl look. Spanning from Fearless to Speak Now, these were the years of her image as a lovelorn lady out for her Nicholas Sparks story. “Mine,” “Dear John,” “If This Was a Movie,” “Better Than Revenge”—there was drama, but Swift’s persona was always squarely on the right of it, with her curls and lipgloss there to back her up.
2012 to 2013
PHOTO: Ethan Miller
And with Red the curls exited stage right, in favor of her now-trademark red lip and sleek bangs. This was Swift with more vindication and agency: if you wrong her, you’re gonna get called out. Curls can have agency, but Swift’s transition to a totally smooth style read like she was tightening her grip on deciding who the world saw. There was still the romance in her lyrics—and what’s more romantic than a red lip?—but with Red’s cover showing her face half in the shadows, only her lips and a shiny lock of hair in the light, Swift painted a narrative of a girl who’d been burnt, but was surviving. The vibe was cardigans and Keds, with red lipstick and cat eye liner; a little kitschy, ’50s nostalgia-cute.
2014 to 2015
PHOTO: Getty
Ah, the age of “Blank Space,” “Shake It Off,” and “Bad Blood.” It was an aggressive time, matched by Swift’s turn to chic, femme fatale looks without a single hair out of place. Her red lips went darker, with 1989‘s cover revolving around her fractured, above the fray self: lips-down on the cover, nose-up on the album liner, and a faded, Polaroid-from-a-distance aesthetic. Truly, she hit an insane balance between approachable BFF (I’m just a girl baking cookies and taking roadtrips with Karlie Kloss) and bombshell living above the rumors (those now-signature two-piece sets; “It had to do with business“).
2016 to mid-2017
PHOTO: Getty Images
This ’twas not an era of much new music for Swift. Her only release was “I Don’t Want to Live Forever” with Zayn Malik for 50 Shades Darker. But personally, it was a huge. With an abundance of think pieces surrounding the Kim/Kanye fiasco, at this point, the world caught on to Swift’s immaculate image control. And so she transformed again.
The first signal came at Coachella, when she debuted a new platinum dye job (which came at Vogue‘s persuasion). Then at the Met Gala, she channeled Debbie Harry’s punk look with dark lips and a shaggier cut. This progressed into a few other decidedly less “safe” looks, including this unexpected rendezvous with contour and bubblegum pink gloss. That was in May 2016, and as you know, she’s been out of the spotlight pretty much since. (Her break from the red carpet, of course, was hardly a vacation—during her sexual assault trial earlier this month she paved the way for anyone fuzzy on consent with her concrete, unyielding testimony.)
Present, looking forward
Everything from here on is speculation, though we’ll surely be seeing plenty of Swift again soon enough. But what we can gather from her new album cover is that we’re in for the singer’s most powerful evolution (both personally and lyrically) yet. Significantly, the cover is black and white—and with headlines covering half Swift’s face, fans are speculating that it implies we’ve only gotten half the story.
Her makeup is pared down and clean with the exception of a not just dark but jet-black lip, and her hair looks wet, which could allude to the concept of rebirth and renewal. Such can also be said that a snake represents the same since it sheds its skin (and it’d fit with her clean slate social media strategy). The conclusion would be that she’s had her persona (and thus, her style) built a certain way, and now the real her is coming out. It’s not commercial, bubblegum, or high-fashion approved—but it’s mature and authentic, a look worn with the confidence of coming into your own.
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