What’s With All the Plaid?
Does it actually mean anything?
“I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately,” I intone. My pitch drops noticeably in correlation with the seriousness of the subject. Microphone in hand, stare sweeping over the crowd. I give a brief pause for dramatic effect. (Because they always do that in movies.) “And I’ve come to the conclusion …” (Is this how Taylor feels when she does the magic wand finger point in a stadium?) “... That it’s fall,” I deadpan at last.
Cue laugh track.
You see, the most common question I got while out on the Taylor Swift Style book tour wasn’t about being a New York Times bestseller (I’ll shake anyone’s hand and kiss anyone’s baby from now until my death if it means I can say, “Hi! My name is Sarah and I’m a New York Times bestselling author - and you are?”), the white whale items I never found that keep me up at night or that haunt me at a Denny’s at 2 a.m. (it’s the same thing to me), or the creative process in turning a blog into a book.
No, no. It was: “Why do you think Taylor is wearing so much plaid lately?”
This, and other hard hitting questions, at 11:00.
I kid.
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The truth is I was asked so many incredibly thoughtful questions by attendees of the Taylor Swift Style book tour. But was I surprised? Not really. TSSers are a more insightful and clever bunch than most and I was, as I often am, very grateful for your candour, your generosity, and your interesting fashion-leaning questions at the 20(!) book tour stops I had across the United States and Canada these last two months. Having so many opportunities to say a sincere, “Thank you” to the people who have changed my life has been a dream.
But it is true that one of the questions I was asked most was about the seeming amount of plaid that Taylor has been wearing lately. And I would guess the primary reason for the level of interest is because, as the human brain needs to do, we want to make sense of it. And surely if we’ve picked up on a pattern there’s something to make sense of. Right? But why is that exactly?
Well, somewhere around the time Taylor tried to gatekeep gaslight girlboss the title of her seventh studio album from us by making it a literal neon sign in a music video, fandom Easter Egg theories have skyrocketed. While these days it feels like we’re living in a The Walking Dead Egg episode zombie apocalypse - where Egg theories infect one human host after another at an alarming rate - there was a time when we, as fans, used to be happy with the material we were given and asked for nothing more than what was already in front of us. And any time the artist we all cared deeply for decided to let us know she had new material for us to enjoy at last we would all be simply tickled she was gifting us more music to enjoy. Patience was a given. Gratitude and presence abounded.
Those days were before the Lover media blitz of 2019. It was then that Easter Eggs evolved from their original definition (once universally understood as a meta fandom reference to existing canonical content, meant to be perceived by fans with eagle eyes and intensely rich knowledge of The Lore) to the now Swiftian definition of a scavenger hunt for a needle in a haystack of needles. Anything could be a clue so everything is eligible to be interpreted as one.
During Lover’s promo run, Taylor gave a series / of / interviews in 2019 where she seemingly gave this fandom tacit permission to go off its logical rails.
“I try to do Easter Eggs in [rounds]. Like, [the] first round is stuff they can see that predicts what will happen in a couple of months. There’s also, like, second-tier Easter eggs which will be revealed upon the album. Then there’s third tier Easter eggs which are the most deeply embedded Easter eggs, which will be shown on the tour,” she said in a Capital FM interview.
“Can I hint at something three years in advance?” she queried in an interview on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.
“I love that they like the cryptic hint-dropping. Because as long as they like it, I'll keep doing it. It's fun. It feels mischievous and playful,” she characterized for Entertainment Weekly.
And we were off to the Egg races after that.
Suddenly every outfit was “giving” an album of its past, thereby inadvertently giving fans the runway to steer a Maserati down a dead Egg street. I love fandom for many things and for many reasons. Namely, the opportunity to connect with other like minded people. People who love the same things I do, with a rivalling degree of passion and an incredibly niche level of interest.
But what I don’t love is the social currency of virality we’re willing to cash levelheaded logic in for in order to proliferate and peddle the most batshit theories that require a quadratic formula in order to math your way into.
But I am nothing if not someone who loves to please pathologically. So I’ll entertain the conversation - with some TSS logical guardrails and parameters in place.
So … *is* Taylor wearing an inordinate amount of plaid lately?
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