My apologies for being a bit quiet on here as of late. Typically, Liner Notes sees a weekly publishing cadence. This August, when one week stretched into two without a peep from me - I got a few panicked flurries. As two weeks extended into three, my guilt mingled with a resigned (and entirely foreign) feeling that - perhaps - these types of lapses are … okay? Normal? A natural observance that the modern construct of work, output, and productivity isn’t realistic for the human condition?
So I’ve rested.
I’ve read books on my patio under balmy sunsets (I just finished Girl’s Girl and The Names and am starting The Calamity Club as I sit here at this very moment about to board a flight to … Copenhagen!), Phoebe’s Lost Weekend remixing satisfyingly with the ambient buzz of my outdoor string lights guiding me through page after page. I’ve celebrated friends getting married and also celebrated my own wedding anniversary. I’ve sat in the discomfort of Not Doing - straining against the innate gravity within me that has been trained to believe that this is how my worth is measured. I’ve also been reminded of one of my favorite activities: The solo dinner. I recently indulged in a meal - solo - at a buzzy Italian place during a brief stint in San Francisco. As someone who travels by my tastebuds, I’ve discovered the best hack to skirting lengthy waitlists at local dining hot spots is to put your name down … alone! So many of my favorite restaurant memories have been from when I’ve found myself perched on a bar stool, observing the kitchen staff or my fellow diners (or even with my nose in a book) and taking in the ambiance.
In a way, this brief pause has been a convenient knock-on result of August often being a slower time in the pop culture sphere anyway.
Indeed, following her wedding in July, Taylor has opted for a quieter profile. Particularly in comparison to a stacked series of appearances in the spring.
That is, until, she was photographed in London ahead of sound engineer Laura Sisk’s Bath wedding with a new haircut!
The fresh cut had me thinking about Taylor’s hair evolution over the years.
While Taylor Swift Style naturally focuses largely on the clothes she wears, Taylor’s hair is also undeniably a key part of her visual legacy. It has, almost equally in turn as her fashion, played a role in defining the aesthetic timeline of her eras.
So today, in honor of the cut, you’ll find below a review of her hair eras.
Or … er … hair-as, if you will.
I’ll be here all night, folks!
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The Natural Curls
Even Taylor’s early entry into the music industry demonstrated a savvy display of distilling her artistic viewpoint into as concise an image as possible — and, perhaps most crucially, emphasizing what set her apart.
At the time, Taylor’s country music contemporaries were mostly older men with a median age tilting towards the late 40s and a listening demographic of women in their mid-30s. Taylor, by contrast, was a teenage girl: the precise antithesis of the genre’s dominant voice. She didn’t look like the people already occupying the space, nor did her music speak to their experiences. Rather than trying to disguise or compensate for those differences, she made those distinctions her brand talking points. As she said in her recently delivered Icon Session at the Grammy Museum, upon reflecting on her success, she observes that it happened precisely because “I didn’t listen to the people who said I didn’t have a valid perspective on life because I didn’t fit into a certain demographic … Ultimately, we’re dealing in emotional truths that either resonate or don’t.” The degree of that resonance correlates directly to its authenticity. Trusting audiences to be smart and emotionally attuned served as a more successful long-term strategy than any amount of data analysis or reverse engineering a hit would ever be. Some of today’s artists might want to take note!
📝 ICYMI: My Liner Notes from Taylor’s Grammy Museum interview + performance.
Her curls, then, became a defining feature.
At a time when sleek straight hair was the major mainstream look with the aggressive flat-ironing of just about everything in sight, Taylor’s choice to highlight her ringlets had her stand out. This earliest version of her curls seemed closest to her natural texture: a voluminous, relatively untouched tumble of waves that didn’t feel precious, glamorized, or overly-styled.
The Smoothed Curls
Her curls changed just slightly in the Fearless and Speak Now years. The ringlets were styled into a smoother, more defined shape and bounced to a shorter length around her chest.
As perhaps a precursor to what would become her defining hair look, it was during this time that Taylor also dabbled in straightened hair and bangs — the latter thanks to the temporary convenience of a clip-in set.
The Bangs (Part 1)
A cut that should look quite familiar to us all by now. It was during the original RED era — with thanks to the sharp-eyed beauty personnel at Vogue — that Taylor discovered the look that would become pretty much synonymous with her image for the majority of her career thus far?.
As part of her spread with famed photographer Mario Testino for Vogue’s January issue in 2012 (which remains one of my favorite covers she’s done ever), the team suggested a dramatic hair reveal for the cover. Taylor’s response? “Oh, just cut it. It’s Vogue.” Atta girl!
ICYMI: My definitive list of Taylor’s fashion favorites across all categories.
That high trust had an equally high payoff. Taylor’s longer length with brow-skimming bangs gained traction in the early 2010s as the go-to haircut for those after a bit of quirk. Taylor was joined in propelling the style’s popularity by Zooey Deschanel and her portrayal of the whimsical Jess Day on New Girl. Fashion “it girls” Alexa Chung and Suki Waterhouse also afforded the cut an editorial edge.
It’s not particularly surprising that this period of time saw Taylor experimenting with her visuals. If her first few albums were about establishing a visual identity, the handful of albums that followed centered on seeing just how far those artistic boundaries could be pushed - gaining new audiences with the exploration of a new sound and matching image, while also retaining recognition for the core audience she had developed.
Looks Like You’re Trying Lives (For Live Performances) On
If you required further proof that Taylor’s hair is just as intrinsic as her fashion to the chronology of her visual legacy, here are the bridge points on the later legs of her Speak Now and RED tours when the clothes and the hair are a few beats out of sync with one another. A little disorienting, no?
The Bob
A new soundtrack … and a new haircut to match.
Barring the bottle of peroxide to come, Taylor’s 1989 bob was — at the time — her most dramatic hair change of all. Shorn off while backstage as the RED Tour approached its final leg in Asia, Taylor recounted the momentous occasion of this cut in the prologue of the re-recorded 1989 (Taylor’s Version).
“When I was 24 I sat in a backstage dressing room in London, buzzing with anticipation,” she wrote. “My backup singers and bandmates gathered around me in a scattered circle. Scissors emerged and I watched in the mirror as my locks of long curly hair fell in piles on the floor. There I was in my plaid button down shirt, grinning sheepishly as my tour mates and friends cheered on my haircut. This simple thing that everyone does. But I had a secret. For me, it was more than a change of hairstyle. When I was 24, I decided to completely reinvent myself.”
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This is the part when we are reminded that fashion and beauty are powerful communication tools. And more than that, they’re also the methods in which we engage in to reflect who we are — or want to be. How we dress or package ourselves matters. Sometimes it’s a direct expression of where we’re at in life. At other times, it’s the cliff jump propulsion we need to usher us closer to the next version of ourselves we’re meant to become. There are some parties who think we store memories - and trauma - in our hair and that the act of shearing off the dead weight is freeing.
I can remember the emotional turbulence of my early and mid-20s. The period of life that film and television have, together, conspired as the years when you’ll have “it” all figured out. “It”, presumably, being the traditional trappings that mark adulthood: Career, relationship, property, family. I think I would have had an easier time navigating this decade if I’d been taught how to have a relationship with ignorance, shortcomings, and failure. Untangling the fantasy of what my 20s were sold to me as was actually harder than the reality of going through it.
But in the absence of that, there was the freedom of a bob haircut.
When I graduated from university and started my first job as a newspaper reporter, I joined Taylor in the pursuit of reinvention and also cut my hair to chin-length. We may not have figured everything out, but we sure looked cute while we tried.
Did you ever get hair inspiration from Taylor? I’d love to hear about any changes she might have incited for you.
Bleachella
A look that requires no introduction because it’s a hair transformation that necessitated a new vocabulary.
“Bleachella” was so coined when Taylor debuted her freshly bleached locks at the 2016 Coachella music festival which she attended to take in the performance sets of then-boyfriend Calvin Harris.
The impetus for the dramatic change? We once again have the editorial foresight of the Vogue staff to thank. The headline for their April 2016 issue — “Taylor Swift As You’ve Never Seen Her Before” — was a little on the nose, but it was undeniably an accurate one. It really was a completely new look from Taylor.
But bleached hair requires a lot of upkeep. Taylor retained the shock of her whitened hair as long as it took for her major cochair moment at that year’s Met Gala in May 2016 but shortly thereafter let her natural color take root, pun intended. Her Louis Vuitton mini dress worn on the red carpet fell into the commonly-followed glitter glam bot interpretation of that year’s theme: Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology. Taylor has not attended the Met Gala since.
Divisive as her dalliance with peroxide may have been, it did give us the gift of one of Taylor’s greatest bridges in her discography: “Dress.”
For that, I know I’m grateful!
The Dip Dye
Fashion trends often embody the path of a pendulum’s swing or a time machine warp. The definitions of what’s trending in silhouette, color, and fabrication often oscillate from one extreme to the other or jump in increments of 20-30 years.
It’s why we’ve dramatically swung from squeezing our thighs into the skin-tight casing of skinny jeans to the “I will scream if this fabric touches my body” curved barrel style of today.
To the point, in the aftermath of bleaching her world of color, Taylor took aim at infusing her world with hues of all shades. Her clothes were taken over by tie dye and the ends of her hair received a similar effect thanks to temporary dip dye in shades of pink, purple, blue, and even yellow. It was a fun and somewhat silly change up as compared to the dramatic chops and bleaching of the past. She just wanted to get a little blue going on for the Teen Vogue party, as it were.
Lights, Camera, Action … (Hair)Cut!
Taylor’s hair evolution has mostly centered on cut over color. She has, however, donned a wig in a few of her music videos as she’s stepped into different “characters” as part of a video concept.
These brief glimpses at Taylor in other shades outside her natural blonde have just demonstrated to me that Taylor can pull off just about anything. That red, in particular!
The DIY
Some might make the case for Lover as Taylor’s final era using her hair as a marketing release mechanism, but I’d like to submit the sister albums folklore and evermore for consideration.
While not related to a cut or a dramatic dye job, in a time when our glimpses at other humans was at a physical distance where details can be lost or from the waist up in the virtual format that at-home quarantining made so necessary, Taylor took advantage and employed some very easy hair styling tactics as a way to communicate what era we were in.
In point of fact, this is the one era where Taylor took the reins - as an adult - to style herself. In respecting the health of her usual style team, Taylor chose not to ask them to be apart from their families in the midst of the health crisis. Four years after folklore’s release, Taylor spoke about the origins of the album’s making from the Eras Tour stage. “Making an album is usually such a collaborative situation. You usually get lots of people together, you usually get to play all these new songs for your friends or your band and you get to be in the same room with the people you’re writing or producing with. All of that went away during the pandemic,” she explained. She added, “You can’t have hair and makeup. You can’t have wardrobe. You just have to do it yourself … I ordered all these night gowns online and brought them and did my own hair and makeup and just was like, ‘I guess I’ll braid it, I don’t know.’”
Meaning the sweet space buns and centered French plait that defined the album visuals of folklore and evermore came not just from her mind, but by her own two hands as well.
The Bangs (Redux)
The Eras era is perhaps what has most effectively cemented Taylor’s signature hair look in the zeitgeist.
The images of her on this record-breaking spectacle will surely endure as one of the most defining snapshots of her career. Alongside the glittery Versace bodysuits and stunning Nicole + Felicia ballgowns will be the image of her long hair and bangs. Taylor at her most Taylor!
Of course, one of my favorite — and charming! — aspects of the Eras Tour is how Taylor’s hair became a character of its own. Indeed, it almost mirrored the show’s sectioned-off costumes as a method of identifying just where you were in the setlist based the texture of her hair. Her pin straight opening look morphing from era to era based on the whims of humidity and exertion, corkscrewing and expanding into the texture of her natural curls.
The Lob(ish)
… Which brings us to this latest cut.
To be sure, it’s not a dramatically restyled departure in the grand scheme of things. But after maintaining a staunch devotion to a long ribcage-length cut with bangs for years, any change is change! Taylor’s new ‘do appears to land just below her shoulders. The omnipresent bangs that have become one of her aesthetic signatures still accounted for. Albeit when we saw her at Sisk’s wedding, they were swooped off to the side and styled with a deep side part — a close revival to how she styled her previous big “chop” in the original 1989 era. Perhaps representing a tentative first few steps to growing them out? It will remain to be seen! Her hair at a recent Emmy party, proof that the campaign trail for this awards season is being laid, seemed to show a fresh bang trim. I’m interested to see how Taylor continues to style the look and if we really are bidding adieu to her long-worn bangs.
Much chatter has also been made about the potential deeper meaning for the hair change. As the above transitions to Taylor’s tresses have outlined, Taylor has a history of using her hair as a bellwether to indicate that a new era is around the corner. But is that the case here? Some seem to think so!
I personally land in the “post-wedding chop” camp. This is a well-documented phenomenon where brides - either shortly after or sometimes even during their nuptials - lob off many inches of hair. To some, doing so represents a fresh start as a new chapter of life begins. Many brides have a certain idea leading up to their wedding day of how they’d like their hair to look or be styled. As such, they’re often locked into a certain style until the exchanging of “I do”s. Longer lengths, naturally, give more flexibility for style variety — whether that’s an intricate updo or a glossy blowout. Taylor’s long layers and forehead-grazing fringe have been a longstanding part of her visual identity. It’s natural that, for her wedding, she would want to feel - and look - the most like “herself.” But now that the wedding’s over? She might be ready to shake it off … the length, bangs, and all.
That said, I do think that new music lies closer down the road ahead than I had previously imagined. But rather than the haircut premeditating the music, I think both creative outputs are flowing independently of one another and this new hair length will simply be folded into the visual DNA of the next work that is to come — whenever that may be (though my eyes are landing in the vicinity of next spring).
Your turn, now! What do you think of Taylor’s past hair eras? Do you have a favorite cut? And do you think this new length means anything? If so, what? I’d love to read them all in the comments — see you there.
Ngl, there’s something particularly alluring about au naturel, frizzy Tayhair. Not sure what the new do means exactly, but her natural color frizzy curls are awesome. She could probably power a light bulb (or amplifier) with all the static electricity in her frizzy curls. 🫶🤓🧠⚡️💡🎸🤭🫣🤪
Also my fave hair of hers would have to be debut/rep/folkmore. Can you tell I like her curly hair? Lol though I also do love the red era