Taylor's style in three words
Her looks can always end in burning flames or paradise tbh
Styling is the never-ending work of making yourself, and by extension your life, look and feel the way you want to. You may have seen stylist Allison Borstein’s method for defining your style. She suggests coming up with three words: the first is practical and describes what you wear the most. The second is aspirational – what kind of person would you like to be or look like? And the third is an emotional word about how you want your clothes to make you feel.
As always when I’m provided with a new thought structure, I mapped it onto Taylor and her work. I was talking clothes with two fashion-oriented friends, a discussion that has spanned decades and an obsessive level of detail. I was thinking really hard about my own three words. This is hard for an inveterate magpie like me. Bold? Dainty? Whimsical? Minimalist? I ended up throwing out the word “delicate” to cover the pretty, feminine detail that I like my clothes to have, while not being overtly girly. In my defence, I was not making everything about Taylor, for once. But my friend Helen helped me out by immediately making the obvious connection to a song that is about detail, fragility and the unknown, but also about hope springing eternal.
Picking my three style words from an existing dataset that is coincidentally my favourite body of work in the world, what could be more fun? I went through the list of all her songs and decided on Clean for my practical word, and Fearless for my aspirational word. The words stand on their own but I love the resonance of each song. Clean is about feeling new but not in a fresh-out-of-the-packet way. I prefer second-hand shopping and the lyric “it was months and months of back and forth” could describe some of my more fraught attempts to make offers on Vinted. I have sold dresses online whose only crime was being worn during an unpleasant work interaction. The bad vibes are cleansed through the process of being handed over to someone new, who can make a new story. I love a bit of 90s minimalism and who knows, maybe the owner was totally buggin’, but now I can wear my Miu-Miu-esque kilt with no negative thoughts in my head.
Fearless is my aspirational word for so many reasons. Over time, you can become a bit more of a scaredy-cat when it comes to clothes. Some boyfriend says he hates that frumpy outfit, or your mother asks if you’re really going out like that, or an interviewer calls and says you got the job but nearly didn’t because you wore jeans to the interview (true story, sorry for being 25 years old Janet!!!!! I eventually lost that job because I couldn’t conceal how bored I was and she said she would “never hire a young woman again”.) Maybe you feel social pressure to cover up a big tummy or bountiful boobs in case you offend. Maybe you’re a normie surrounded by other normies and to break the dress code is to risk being cast into the social wilderness. I don’t think any of these fears are baseless. People pay a lot of attention to how you dress, whether they realise it or not. But I must – I must – dress the way I want to dress. Boyfriends or potential boyfriends, mothers, Janet, street harassers or the other women around me all have a say but at the end of the day, I want to dress to reflect the scale and colour of how I feel inside. I want to be a little more brave in how I dress, headfirst, fearless.
I wonder what words Taylor would choose for her style. It’s the kind of thoughtful, intentional thing I can imagine her doing. There’s obviously a big difference in how she dresses onstage to when she’s hanging out at home but, as always with her, there’s an invisible string between the sparkly Versace bodysuit and the dungarees and pink sweatshirt she wore to talk about her need for approval in Miss Americana. “Feminine” is a bit of complex word to describe clothes because it means something different to everyone, but “dress” is the most common clothing word in Taylor’s lyrics (with a noticeable drop-off since folklore as the super-girlinessevolved into more mature themes, excepting a nostalgia appearance in “But Daddy”). Taylor’s style is defined by a soft girliness, moving from the pretty prom dresses of her early career to the billowing folklore/evermore dresses on the tour, and the fluffy lavender jacket she wore for the Midnights section. When we as fans dressed up for the tour, there were lots of ruffly minidresses, pink, and Enchanted gowns. You know you’re a style icon when someone can be a drag queen of you, but it’s also true if you can spot a fan a mile off, without needing to see which artist is on someone’s t-shirt. Another theory is that you should be able to tell an iconic popstar by their silhouette. If we channeled the iconic popstar within, what would our silhouettes look like?
The words that describe Taylor’s style could be classic - powerful - adorable. She usually reaches for classic American prep looks when she’s left to her own devices. Her vices include taking the adorableness too far with a few too many ruffles, a rainbow shade too many or too bright, or ill-advised attempts to bring edge into her outfit. But she’s a cutie, and even though it’s not to my taste, I like when she expresses her humour, charisma and vitality through her clothes. She looks her best when, in addition to these features, she taps into powerfulness. I’m thinking of her sparkly tall boots for “The Man” at Eras, or one of my all-time faves, the plain black catsuit she wore to sing ATW10 on Saturday Night Live. See her Time Magazine Person of the Year shoot for all three of these words in evidence.
I like the three words system not for limiting what you can wear, but for honing who you want to be. Getting dressed can be very fun, but if it worries you in any way it can also take time better spent writing songs or going for a walk. It’s not an excuse to shop, but more an exercise in reflecting what you already have and what deserves to stay with you. Styling is not shopping. In one of the most amazing images from the Time Magazine shoot, Taylor wears a black jersey bodysuit that I believe is Alaia but it doesn’t really matter. It’s not about the $1000 bodysuit. It’s the Taylor inside it. Imagine the 17 year old Taylor wearing that, and trying to fold herself in half in embarrassment. But this Taylor is the same classic Taylor as always, cleaned up in black jersey and red lipstick; powerful Taylor, staring down the camera without a smile, her free hand half-curled into a fist; adorable Taylor wearing her favourite accessory, the one that encapsulates who she is and what she loves… a cat.
Choose your Taylor-themed three words: