Two Years Later
February 2012
Taylor is sitting in the front row of the Rodarte spring 2012 ready-to-wear show during New York Fashion Week. She looks prim, if not chaste, in an ivory-colored confection with long, lacy sleeves, a high neck, and a full-length skirt (a look from Rodarte's fall collection that was inspired in part by the spirit of the Kansas homestead). It is the sort of getup that treads a fine line between sincerity and irony, between too-literal costume and clever fashion reference. In other words, it takes a girl with a special sort of moxie to wear it without looking like Melissa Sue Anderson from Little House on the Prairie. The fact that Taylor is supermodel thin, towers over everyone (at five feet ten she clocks in at well over six feet in platform Miu Mius), and has skin as pale as the moon...well, let's just say she falls somewhere on the continuum from fetching to dazzling.
Perched here among the professionally blasé, she is all smiley gee-whiz confidence, full of hugs and exclamation points. Strangely enough, her opposite is sitting just two seats down: Rooney Mara, still in Lisbeth Salander mode, wearing all black and looking pale-to-green spooky. An editor sitting nearby jokes that the two could be the good witch and the wicked witch from The Wizard of Oz.
As the models begin their procession, it quickly becomes clear that Rodarte, whose bad-witch aesthetic has made the Mulleavy sisters fashion darlings, has moved into Glinda territory. It looks as though they asked their casting director for an army of Taylor Swifts - lithe, pretty blondes with long, wavy hair, but wearing zombie makeup. Indeed, the entire collection (a parade of girly-pretty dresses, skirts, and hand-knit sweaters in a swirl of cornflower blue and sunflower yellow, with a few van Gogh Starry Night prints thrown in for good measure) looks as if it were designed for Taylor.
"I have never been to a show where I wanted to wear everything," she says breathlessly.
Afterward, as we plunge into the crush on the street to find her car and driver, I overhear someone describe the collection as "prom on acid." It strikes me that Taylor herself might be described as all prom and no acid (for a certain audience, her music and her look are still stuck in teenage gear.) Which is why it comes as a nice surprise to discover just how sharp she is now, two years later from the last time we talked. She is clever and funny and occasionally downright bawdy as we ride around town with a small entourage on this hot fall day, visiting designer showrooms.
Indeed, one of the first things she mentions is an infamous clip on YouTube that features a deadpan obscenity-laced narration. She knows every line, though she asks if her cursing can be off the record. She may be edgier now than her image suggests, but she is not Courtney Love. She still has a deeply ingrained sense of appropriateness. She also knows her audience, and knows that they aren't ready for her to grow up quite yet.
As we crawl through lower Manhattan gridlock toward Alexander Wang's showroom, we wind up in a conversation about how one never really gets over high school. If Taylor has been criticized for being somewhat arrested in her creative development (stuck in prom, as it were) that tendency has lent her an uncanny ability to capture in her songs the vulnerable mindset of teen girls everywhere.
"Why you gotta be so mean?" she sings in the straight-up country song that defined her amazing year in many ways and has been nominated for two Grammys. Clearly, her school days remain all-too-vivid. Taylor recalls when she was in fourth grade and her family first moved to Wyomis sing, an affluent suburb of Reading.
"So . . . middle school? Awkward," she says, launching into the first of many comic riffs. "Having a hobby that's different from everyone else's? Awkward. Singing the national anthem on weekends instead of going to sleepovers? More awkward. Braces? Awkward. Gain a lot of weight before you hit the growth spurt? Awkward. Frizzy hair, don't embrace the curls yet? Awkward. Try to straighten it? Awkward!" She starts to laugh. "So many phases!"
As hard as it is to imagine now, Taylor always felt like an outsider.
"I think who you are in school really sticks with you," she says. "I don't ever feel like the cool kid at the party, ever. It's like, Smile and be nice to everybody, because you were not invited to be here."
When I confess I played the cymbals in marching band during my freshman year, she high-fives me.
"All of my favorite people, people I really trust, none of them were cool in their younger years," she says. "Because if you know how to be cool in middle school, maybe you have skills you shouldn't. Maybe you know how to be conniving, like, naturally." She laughs. "There's always that seventh-grade girl who looks like she's 25. And you're like, How do you do it? How do you do it, Sarah Jaxheimer?" She lets out a comically ear-piercing shriek: "Why is your hair always so shiny?!" (Later, I Google Sarah Jaxheimer, and sure enough, she has perfect, lustrous Jennifer Aniston hair.)
Taylor finally stopped caring about being cool.
"I think that happened as soon as I left school, when I was sixteen, because then all that mattered was music and this dream that I'd had my whole life. It never mattered to me that people in school didn't think that country music was cool, and they made fun of me for it, though it did matter to me that I was not wearing the clothes that everybody was wearing at that moment. But at some point, I was just like, I like wearing sundresses and cowboy boots."
Apparently, so do a lot of other people. A couple of weeks earlier I watched Taylor perform for a stadium of 50,000 people in Philadelphia, for all intents and purposes her hometown crowd. I had never seen so many teens and tweens and little girls with their mothers in sundresses and cowboy boots.
"I look out at the stadiums full of people and see them all knowing the words to songs I wrote," says Taylor. "And curling their hair! I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It's just funny. And wonderful."
The fact that Taylor, now at twenty-two, already appreciates the delicious irony in that speaks volumes about her grown-up sense of perspective. That she's also the only kid at the table when it comes to filling huge stadiums also suggests she has a heft beyond her years. How many artists can even fill a stadium these days?
"Um . . . Kenny Chesney, U2, and Paul McCartney. There aren't many stadium shows anymore," she says. "It's no small feat, and I know that. When you walk out onstage in front of 65,000 people, it can bring you to tears. If you really take it in at the end of a song and you hear that many people screaming, it will make you cry."
Do you ever get freaked out?
"This is what I've wanted to do my whole life," she says. "It never freaks me out. Never. Ever." She pauses for a moment. "But you know what does freak me out? When is the other shoe going to drop? I am so happy right now. So I am always living in fear. This can't be real, right? This can't really be my life."
