Before I begin in earnest, it might first be worth noting that I have no particular knowledge, nor opinion, of Taylor Swift the person and/or artist. I’m sure if someone hummed her greatest hits I might recognise one or two, but I can’t name any of her songs off the top of my head (though I did take a look at her song list as very superficial research, looking for figurative hints). Nevertheless, I am compelled to expound upon an outfit she wore to the 2018 American Music Awards. I began as I usually do by looking for an image I might legitimately credit (rather than bumming one off some random website), and lo and behold then stumbled across multiple images of the same outfit.
Discovering a ‘full length’ version, and having previously only seen the ‘portrait’ view (that is, head, shoulders and midriff), only piqued my interest even further. This is a tale of two parts; the top and the bottom, the before and after, the fragment and the whole. I should note—for those who may already be familiar with this subject—that I intend to discuss specific images (the ones included here) and not necessarily the garment in other contexts, such as when she apparently won an award.
This shimmering construction of hers is fascinating and illuminating in more ways than just the literal one. It’s important for me to register my lack of foreknowledge in regard to Swift herself, since it avoids any expectation that I might be able to draw from her actual life or art in my examination of the garment or its various visual expressions (and avoid any potential vitriol in regard to that ignorance). It is possible that some designer or stylist chose or manufactured her attire for her, and Swift herself had no part in it. But I’m not so sure about that.
Part One: The Upper Stratosphere
Firstly, this outfit is one that is reliant upon particular angles; not just because of the nature in which it reflects light and, therefore, some of the environment through which it moves, but also because it absolutely looks better from particular directions, and under certain kinds of light (particularly the bright kind). The garment does its best work reflecting a bright background, interspersed with dashes of colour, as they do in the photograph which originally caught my eye:
There’s also something about that horizontal bar of light that probably deserves some credit. Image: Emma McIntyre / Getty
Because it’s this particular image we’re looking at, we cannot see the cuff and so that’s not something that can be commented on here (have no fear; it’s visible in part two and we’ll get to that aspect in due time). In regard to angles, there’s something about the way these pixel-like squares have been pulled together in a rounded, shaped piece of clothing that to my eye is mesmerising, and I also think that’s a significant part of the point. It is designed specifically to draw the eye; to gather that first glance.
Nothing quite says “take a look at yourself” than a mirror, and in fashion terms, on a red carpet it’s hard not to extrapolate that message more broadly across various media and gazes and consumers. While it may not immediately leap to the foremost thought—after all, there’s so much else going on here—it is undeniably an aspect of the garment’s purpose.
It’s bold, and it sends a message. A strong one. These elements are my favourite kind of combination, even when they don’t necessarily work in their entirety. In this case, there’s an illusory patterning going on, and though I haven’t seen it in motion I can only imagine it’s even more striking in person.
Swift looks like a kind of dazzling fish, sliding with an effortless grace through her environment; here, a press gallery, I assume. Perhaps the reflective scales allude to an exterior-as-distraction, as a means of deflecting attention from the self. I’m often curious to consider just how celebrities view themselves in these kinds of circumstances, because while many clearly revel in the attention (as Swift herself may, for all I know), I’m not sure that all of them do. Ergo, what would it be like to try to negotiate such intense scrutiny without the means of diverting at least some aspect of that gaze from one’s actual self?
The mirror-scales also suggest the formation of something like a suit of armour, a post-modern shield against intrusion. Perhaps she feels like she is going into battle? To fend off the unsolicited objectifications which are part of the package of fame. I ask these questions precisely because I don’t know enough about her persona to make any kind of reasonable judgement about it; perhaps there’s an obvious answer, but I suspect there is not.
It is impossible to look upon the mirror-like qualities of this particular garment without a strong sense of the reflective quality itself. Swift seems, in my reading of this image, to be consciously reflecting media attention, or even attention in general, back upon itself. Whether or not this particular music award ceremony was an event with any particular political significance or not, I admittedly have not bothered to check. Classical renditions of mirrors usually suggest that they reflect truth; that is, that one’s opinion of one’s self is often distorted, but the mirror simply reflects what is actually there. As Sylvia Plath put it in her poem, Mirror:
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike
I am not cruel, only truthful,
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
One could easily see the appeal of transmogrifying this kind of reflective truth and honesty into a garment; after all, one’s attire to a certain extent signifies the self, or the self’s intent, or expression, and therefore via that same attire can attempt to communicate a part of the self to those under whose gaze one happens to fall. In this case, a pop superstar who may be attempting to speak truth.
Whatever her actual intent, I see a measure of attempted truthfulness—or, at the very least, a comment on the value of truthfulness—in the inspiration of this particular garment. If I had to guess, I’d guess that Swift is—or was, when she wore this particular garment—making a concerted effort to be sincere. As well as aiming a level of criticism at gazes and, perhaps more pointedly, opinions which are derived from gazes (not unlike what you are reading right now, for example). Perhaps even a search for the self, at which point I borrow again from Plath’s Mirror:
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
There’s a precision to the torso that I really admire; it has lines which defy definition and are perhaps both hard and soft at the same time. The collar is also fascinating: at the front it appears to be akin to a choker, quite tight and controlled. Yet this is another illusion; it relaxes at the back, hiding its sense of calm and ease, and presenting a facade of control instead. That’s the opposite of how these things usually go.
The shoulders come to a point—not like some eighties power-trip kind of point, and not bulked up, but the definitions are there—and are suggestive of strength; the contours are definitive and firm-edged. Yet this is set immediately against the shapely contour of the rest of her form, in a much more traditional way: not at all revealing, but undoubtedly suggestive. It cinches at the waist, of course, and despite its curvature is not particularly provocative. It does what it does with the same language of control in which the collar speaks.
The last detail which struck me as noteworthy is the way that the reflection also cascades up and under her throat and chin, spraying her larynx with colour and light. This is likely an accident of design, but Swift is, after all, a singer and it is mightily coincidental that the brightest reflections, like a shimmering glitter, have cast themselves over her foremost tool: her vocal cords.
To me this garment manifests a mastery of visual expression. Swift has managed, in a single image, to cast attention not only on her primary ability—singing—but to also turn a symbolic gaze back upon those who might gaze upon her, or judge her perhaps, or otherwise define her by appearance alone. She is both directing, and misdirecting, with the same garment, which I find sublime.
Part Two: As Above, so Apparently not below
The pick of the bunch amidst a difficult crop. Also, note how the curvature of light is caught across the mid-section of the ‘jacket’ section and, hence, the shoulder shadow acts as a pseudo lapel. Awesome. Image: Getty
This tale, as I mentioned, has two parts. The first was an accident of chance, something I stumbled upon about Taylor Swift which caught my eye and made me think about what it was I was looking at; it gave me pause and inspiration at the same time. Yet in doing so I came to realise—as I often do—that many expressions of couture are best caught in a particular moment, caught within a specific frame and beneath particular light, and that what I enjoy about it is often momentary. That is, I feel as though the particular images and simulacra of the thing are what I’m moved to analyse as much as the thing-unto-itself.
For example, I have no idea what this kind of material would feel like, or how much it might weigh. Perhaps that doesn’t matter? Perhaps it does. Ultimately it’s irrelevant; the material cannot be assessed by anybody but its creator or Swift herself and hence it cannot be ascertained one way or the other.
In this case, that reality dawned upon me when I did see the rest of the outfit, boots and all. The cuffs, as it turns out, are aesthetically perfect and that will always be the length at which I think a cuff should be cut. Unless, of course, there’s some specific reason not to. That’s the choice of an adolescent of the ‘90s, one who came of age amidst grunge and clothing without labels which sought to hide and deform rather than expose.
The full suit disappointed me, perhaps because so much of what was inspirational about its top half wasn’t replicable in the lower half. And by that I mean that legs are not arms, shoulders are not equivalent to hips, and there’s a necessity for footwear involved. What the skirt appears to do is disrupt the structural integrity of the upper section, though possibly by design. It’s worth wondering why that is. The garment works so hard to be precise and both reflective and deflective, though the lower half somehow expresses a severance or visual break in a way which, at least to my first reading, undermines aspects of its purpose. This particular manifestation allows the eye to linger on a wedge of thigh, which lets everyone off the hook and undermines its power. What I wanted was something more contiguous, more definitive, perhaps simply more brutal.
Perhaps I feel the boots in particular let the overall entity down because they are incongruous with the sleek power of the rest of the garment. In the first image, the whole thing seems to be communicating a desire to reflect, to deflect gazes or dissect their intent; the boots only seem to distort that reflective power, turning tight control into a wrinkled chaos of movement. I suspect it would be supremely difficult to engineer any kind of clothing out of whatever the hell it is actually made of. Besides, boots are infinitely better than some kind of strappy nonsense she may otherwise have been tempted to wear, and they at least adhere to the structure of the whole. It can, and could, only work with something opaque.
I already struggle to understand the marvel that is the upper section of this outfit, so to then make it equally effective on a pair of elongated thigh-high boots is probably asking too much. But difficulty isn’t the benchmark—the only result that matters is what we actually witness.
On the other hand, as she walks, what we see is an aesthetic to the boots which almost works, but I suspect it’s the strident physicality of Swift herself which sells this particular perspective, rather than the boots themselves. They do match the garment, of course, but I feel like it’s a stylistic union rather than an aesthetic one.
But that’s likely also the intent, and—my personal preference for aesthetically smashing people in the face aside—there is undoubtedly a form of power residual in that same wedge of flesh which disrupts the rest of her mirror-esque facade. It says: “check out this obvious chink in my armour; you can only conclude that I don’t even need the armour at all.” Aesthetics be damned, that’s pretty fucking badass.
Swift-as-glittering-fish is ultimately a tale of two parts. Perhaps one part of it doesn’t work. Or works in a way I would not, at first, have wanted. But one part of it is absolutely sublime, and perhaps all of it is. The part I see so vividly, and what it communicates to me so clearly, seems to suggest death: of a gaze—perhaps the gaze—by a thousand glances; the reconstruction of that exterior, presumably male, gaze. Turned inward by both deflection and reflection, engineered as both weapon and shield in the same forge, by the same stroke. A masterstroke.
