why taylor doesn’t serve

a guest post by colin mylrea

Café Life, Axel Törneman

Colin Mylrea is a friend and a poet but—more relevantly for this post—he is somebody to whom I DM various Taylor opinions. He and I have chatted in the past about the way Taylor doesn’t map onto the diva model of pop stardom, and I asked him if he had any interest in writing something about it for me. Enjoy!

For the record, I like Taylor’s clothes and think she and I dress in similar ways a lot of the time (not on purpose, I just like chunky black shoes too), but I am, let’s say, not anybody’s idea of a Slay Queen.

I have one TSS post scheduled for early next week in honor of ~*~Valentine’s Day~*~ but unless she does something crazy I will try to give her a rest for a bit. Unfortunately the odds of Taylor doing something crazy are never zero, so.… I’d like to do something on the concept of “overexposure” but it’s not going anywhere.

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Whether you were in the part of the internet that loves Taylor Swift, or the side of the internet that sees her as a plague sent by God, her photo shoot for Time magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year issue confirmed everything you already knew. If you were in the former category, that photo shoot was yet another accomplishment Taylor made during her second¹ imperial phase, one that reified her standing as the defining pop star of the last ten years. But people who dislike her were happy to see, once again, that Taylor Swift cannot channel glamor the way a pop star ought—making her the paper tiger of America’s moribund pop cultural landscape.

Because the photos accompanying the profile are bad. Despite being shot by Inez and Vinoodh, a photography team with high fashion bona fides, a certain uncoolness remains. They’re conceptually shaky, lacking an imaginative throughline (Taylor in a black bodysuit with her cat draped around her neck! Taylor in bad Lydia Tár cosplay! Taylor beset by flyways in a stadium coat!) to make them compelling. Even when given an opportunity to flaunt on a massive scale, Taylor will, somehow, always fall back on a less interesting image. She is, in short, terminally unable to serve.

Like a lot of terms from the gay community that picked up steam and were promptly silkscreened onto clothing at Forever 21 during the 2010s, there’s no one precise origin for terms like “slaying,” “serving,” etc., outside of a vague origin in ballroom culture and Black trans culture. They were introduced to outsiders by the subjects of Paris is Burning in the nineties, then to a wider audience via shows like Broad City and, of course, RuPaul’s Drag Race.² The total divorce of these words from their original context means that, opening twitter during and major red carpet event, a lot of discourse around fashion has taken on the tenor of:

The precise looks to which these terms and enthusiasm apply usually fall into one of two categories:

• Someone is wearing an archival Mugler, Versace, etc. dress. Think something sculpted, latex, and extremely sexual but in a cerebral and alienating way.

• A contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race would wear this—that is, someone is wearing the above, but with padding and makeup that makes them look like an even more sparkly Jessica Rabbit.

The stars who wear these outfits fit into a mode of celebrity for pop stars whose reputations are burnished online by a Too Online type of gay guy who is still making jokes about drinking iced coffee and how [well-produced, but eminently forgettable pop song by an A-list singer]³ deserved better. The ideal pop star for this part of twitter follows the narrative arc of Bobbie Gentry’s song “Fancy.” She (and it’s always she), has a difficult childhood and a messy, sometimes harrowing personal life, but remains unapologetically glamorous.⁴ There’s also, in most cases, a semi-condescending pity and an undercurrent of “good for you!” that buoys even the most tragic examples against the vicissitudes of an indifferent public, especially if the figure in question is on a downward spiral. Even if the singers, actresses, models who inhabit this category are actually popular, or were once four-quadrant hitmakers or movie stars, invoking their name is still a shibboleth.

Taylor Swift is just too popular to fall into this category. She is one of the last⁵ musical artists that can command a wide audience on her own terms and seems content to not cater to one particular subsection more than any other.⁶ Nothing’s she’s done aesthetically really puts her in the same category as a Carly Rae Jepsen (diffident, hopeful songs about love in an abstract sense), Donna Summer (serpentine, sexual, ecstatic), or Kylie Minogue (breathy vocals and really good beats… like out of this world good club beats) who all display isolation from their audiences in smiling upon them like the New Colossus lifting a bottle of Rush in a lamé bodysuit.

The diva par excellence, however, is Cher. Part of her aesthetic power derives from her close and long-term collaboration with the designer Bob Mackie, whose work is (intentionally or subconsciously) never far from the mind of the people who think Swift can’t serve.⁷ Mackie met Cher after dressing her for an episode of the Carol Burnett show, and became a close collaborator after. In addition to cultivating a close friendship, the two are, in a way. equally responsible for each other’s image, with Cher’s ethereal grace as a performer both enhancing the glamour of, and grounding, even the most outrageous of Mackie’s dresses, making natural what was born in artifice.

One of the best outfits from this partnership was the so-called “naked dress” designed for the 1974 MET Gala, which Cher would wear on the cover of Time almost a year later in 1975:

Cher is simply serving in this dress. Unlike the awkwardly-posed Swift photos, she’s fully in command of the dress itself and, as stated before, looks eminently comfortable in it. Mackie himself noted her confidence: “She was never intimidated by anything that I ever put on her.… She was just amazing in that department.” This is the essence of serving qua internet discourse: to be totally at ease with glamour and to wear it as one’s skin. 

When wearing a bevy of similar outfits to promote Midnights, despite the dresses themselves looking lovely, it’s easy to register a kind of discomfort on Swift’s part on the red carpet. One of the problems with her “Eras” gimmick is that she’s often swallowed whole by clothes chosen to reinforce something quite arbitrarily related to the album. Is Midnights a disco album? Not really. (Compare to erstwhile stan twitter favorites Dua Lipa and Jessie Ware.) While some of her outfits were fine, going full disco glamazon (something Taylor’s decidedly not) instead of doing something more subdued to match the tone of the record feels like an unforced error. Yet here she is:

The other reason Taylor seems to be separate from this category is that she both does and doesn’t have a “signature look” or designer, outside of her red lipstick and winged eyeliner. When Taylor is styled in-line with the expectations of the rubric of slayage, it seems to work against the girl-next-door, “big sister” image she cultivates for her audience, both onstage and in her paparazzi photos:

donatella_versace

A post shared by @donatella_versace

out and about July 2014

Part of what makes Taylor’s looks as a performer over the years interesting is the costume-yness of the outfits. The openness of style and of reference, and seeming lack of specificity, make them pantomime-adjacent. They’re the most expensive versions of Halloween costumes with labels like “spooky witch,” “classic vampire.” The outfit which best represents this tendency, even if it is a little old at this point, is the circus ringmaster number that she wore performing “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” during the Red tour.⁸

The coat is cut too short in both the front and the tails, making it look undersized, and the fabric of the shirt underneath dims the light reflecting off the sequins and gold hardware. There’s nothing about it that enhances anything about the song or performance, outside of adhering to a pretty thin concept for a performance: dress-up costumes as afterthought.

This is how you end up at the position outlined in the first few paragraphs: that even with the help of all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, Taylor can’t serve. The much more interesting take would be to conclude that Taylor can serve, but chooses not to do so.

A few weeks ago, after the Time photos dropped, the music video for “Our Song,” in which Taylor is undeniably serving, resurfaced. With a tasteful nude lip, sparkly eyeshadow, and a Brigitte Bardotesque bouffant, it prefigures some of the more slay-heavy photo shoots she would do during the promotion cycle for 1989 (and even after):

What makes these more interesting in hindsight is how un-Taylor they feel, especially in comparison to the more archetypal, twee looks she’s known for now. Given how far apart they are, it’s clear Taylor knows this is something she can do, it’s just not something she’s particularly interested in.

Similarly, I’ve always been obsessed with the fact that Taylor has worn Dries van Noten for a couple of photo shoots in the lead up to Red.⁹ It’s not an especially famous house, having been started by its namesake in the 80s, and it enjoys a pleasantly low-key fandom by Real Fashion People. They aren’t really defining looks, but they’re fun choices that speak to a side of her that isn’t as familiar as her more costumey or overtly slaying looks.

Of course, the real standout era for Taylor in terms of style, and one that is rapidly reapproaching with the imminent release of its re-recorded “Taylor’s Version,” is Reputation. While it doesn’t really plunge the depths of the worst public incidents for pop stars, Swift obviously still carries a lot of negative memories about the infamous phone call:

It was a bleak moment. “You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar,” she says. “That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.”

When she re-emerged with a vampy, pseudo-goth look—fuller hips! cinnabar lips!—and some really exquisite choices of outfit, Taylor comes the closest to capturing the energy of the lone moments she had displayed slayage earlier for a prolonged period of time: 

Similarly, in her appearance at the 2023 VMAs, Taylor wore something much more in-line with her Reputation styling for the better:

This is peak Taylor when she wants to be a diva. She looks great in black, the fit of the dress on her is divine, and she captures the glamour that’s been missing from her more recent looks without straying into the try-hard wastes to which Billy Porter was banished after he wore that hat with the electric curtains in the brim. Taylor is going full-throttle, commiting servepuku with Yukio Mothershima at Camp Ichislaya. Mother has arrived.

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Coda: Mother Has Not Quite Arrived

Unfortunately, I have to discard my initial triumphant ending for this essay because I forgot about the Grammy Awards. The verdict: Taylor did not serve. Wearing couture Schiaparelli (a perennial favorite of those who slay) but poorly accessorized and styled (according to twitter), the reactions were unanimously negative:

one example

Again, I think this is a case of Swift not really knowing, or misjudging, what her strengths are. The clean lines are very much Taylor at her best, but the gloves feel superfluous, and the stacked necklaces (timepiece aside) don’t mesh well with the volume of the dress.¹⁰ Compare with some of Schiaparelli’s in-house jewellery here, which—despite my initial bristling at the negative feedback, since I’d put this gown ahead of what she’s been wearing recently—would have been an excellent corrective. Fundamentally, Taylor seems like someone who looks better the lower-key she is.

I think a much better version of what she wanted to do last night could have been achieved had she worn something from Dries van Noten’s spring / summer 2023 collection. (Check out slides 3, 5, and 9 specifically.)

There’s no real button to put on this conversation other than conceding that Taylor is caught in a Servesara of bad choices. She’s capable of breaking free temporarily, but has yet to do so fully. Perhaps one day she’ll reach Slayvana.

1. circa the release of Folklore to present; I’d give her first as being the release of Red to winning AOTY at the Grammy Awards for 1989 in 2016 (anti-Taylor discourse starts up slowly) or the initial fallout from the Kimye phone call (full-blown backlash)

2. Also gifs.

3. Ariana Grande’s “Into You” is the best possible version of this song, imo. [Look, it deserved better.—BDM]

4. Good examples of these types of people I see on twitter now are Anna Nicole Smith, Mariah Carey.

5. Adele is probably the only other person in this category.

6. This includes Gaylors, I’m sorry.

7. At the time of writing, someone who people are holding up as a counterexample as someone who served at the Grammys (more on that later) where Taylor didn’t was Miley Cyrus. Case in point, one of the five outfits she wore that evening was a Mackie dress.

8. For what it’s worth, Taylor kind of revisited this concept in the music video for “ME!,” which leads me to believe that when she performs her inevitable Super Bowl half-time show, it will definitely have a prolonged marching band and / or circus themed opening sequence that launches into “Shake it Off.”  

9. My favourite designer and also Hanya Yanagihara’s favourite designer. I think Taylor would be well-served by a Yanagihara profile, since they both seem to have a fundamental level of discomfort with being super-famous, but I’m going to spend more than this footnote thinking about it. Hey, do you wonder if Taylor’s read A Little Life? I bet that she’d be the perfect person to write a song for the clo—[I am dragged offstage by a shepherd’s crook and beaten within an inch of my life]

10.  I’m not going to talk about the hair.