Taylor Swift is a grasp of weaving her public-facing love life, her star picture, and her artwork collectively, and he or she’s in the midst of an unimaginable maneuver. Did you ever see a gossip press sight as cinematic as Taylor Swift driving off in a convertible with Travis Kelce?
Listed here are the fundamentals: Taylor Swift is the heartbreak queen pop star within the midst of one of the crucial profitable music excursions in historical past. Kelce is the tight finish for the Kansas Metropolis Chiefs, thought of one of many biggest of all time. This 12 months, he’s starting to interrupt by way of to mainstream fame following a reasonably profitable podcast and a well-received flip internet hosting SNL in March. His entire vibe might be greatest captured by “Straight Male Pal,” the SNL sketch he did with Bowen Yang: candy, not notably deep, at all times all the way down to race.
Kelce has been angling after Swift in public for just a few months now. In July, he attended her live performance and stated he tried and failed to offer her a friendship bracelet along with his cellphone quantity on it. On a visitor look on the The Pat McAfee Present podcast final week, Kelce publicly invited Swift to return to one in every of his video games. Swift apparently took him up on it.
Swift spent Sunday watching Kelce play soccer from his non-public suite, screamed “LET’S FUCKING GO!” in his mother’s ear when he scored a landing, after which walked out of the sector with him to drive off into the night time. The end result was a tasty gossip feast.
Is that this entire factor one massive calculated publicity play? Look, in all probability it’s, no less than a bit bit. Swift’s received her forthcoming 1989 rerelease to hype up; Kelce has a podcast to promote. These headlines are a win-win for each of them. However that doesn’t imply that there isn’t data to mine right here.
Swift used to place her love life on the middle of her public picture. Within the early 2010s, the gossip websites have been filled with extremely faux trying photographs of Swift strolling down the road sipping maple lattes with Jake Gyllenhaal or frolicking within the ocean with Tom Hiddleston. These pictures would later encode themselves into a few of Swift’s most susceptible and emotionally genuine songs.
Strategically capitalized letters spelled out MAPLE LATTE within the liner notes for “All Too Effectively,” telling Swift’s followers precisely who known as her up once more simply to interrupt her like a promise. The pap photographs and the songs have been a part of the identical story, and the story was each her artwork and her business product. The photographs regarded so completely posed as to be not possible to imagine in; the songs have been so intimate as to be not possible not to imagine in. It was pop image-making on a really excessive stage.
In 2017, nevertheless, Swift vanished from public view. When she re-emerged, she was totally enmeshed in a relationship with British actor Joe Alwyn, and their love affair can be non-public. Paparazzi photographs have been minimal. They declined to reply questions on their relationship in interviews. Alwyn barely reveals his face in Swift’s Netflix documentary Miss Americana. When he co-wrote songs along with her, he did it below a pen title. Swift has devoted love track after love track to Alwyn, however the gossip press isn’t a part of the story she instructed her followers about him.
Swift and Alwyn introduced their break up this spring. Since then, Swift appears to be having fun with making her love life a part of her image-making once more. It’s as if she’s courting her means by way of the highschool boyfriend archetypes: first a spring fling with an edgy inventive dangerous boy, and now a situationship with a candy himbo jock. Every new picture she creates is a part of the story she’s telling her followers about herself.
Proper now, Swift is feeling her Miss Americana self, embracing the highschool tropes she by no means received to dwell out throughout her life as a toddler star. After spending her teen years positioning herself as an outsider — the one carrying T-shirts on the bleachers, watching the cheerleader along with her excessive heels — Swift is now cosplaying because the the pinnacle cheerleader on a date with the soccer star, the promenade queen on the dais with the promenade king. She’s leaning into essentially the most giddy and teenaged and Aaron Spelling-teen-soap components of her picture, constructing a imaginative and prescient of herself as candy and simple as cotton sweet.
If all of it appears a bit onerous to imagine proper now, simply anticipate the songs to return out.
