Swift—who appears on the International Best-Dressed List this year for the first time—is now also seen as something of a fashion plate, in part due to her association with this coterie of supermodels. (Swift has performed at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show the past two years.) Her everyday uniform, give or take a beret or kitten heel, typically comprises a crop top, a red lip, and a purse carried out in front of her, hanging from a forearm. Swift herself demurs at the label, though. “I think I know how to put together a good outfit,” she says. “But any day you’re going to admit to being a style icon is a day you need to look in the mirror and really check yourself.” She says she doesn’t talk about fashion with her friends: “We never talk about stuff like that. We’ll be like, ‘Those shoes are cute.’ That’s the full conversation. We all dress very differently.” Delevingne concurs: “There’s always a lot more pressing matters going on than what we’re wearing,” the model tells me.
Apple Watch
If Swift wasn’t already the closest thing we have to a pop-cultural empress, the fallout from the open letter she posted on her blog this June, addressed to Apple, made the great power she wields unquestionably clear. The company had announced that it was going to be launching a new juggernaut streaming service, Apple Music, which would allow users to enjoy a three-month free trial before they would be asked to sign up for a $9.99 monthly subscription. Artists, however, would not be compensated for those three free months, which did not sit right with Swift. She wrote, “I say to Apple with all due respect, it’s not too late to change this policy and change the minds of those in the music industry who will be deeply and gravely affected by this. We don’t ask you for free iPhones. Please don’t ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.” She posted the letter in the early morning. By the end of the day, Apple had decided to reverse its policy, and Swift was widely heralded as a savior of the music industry. Swift—who had previously withheld 1989 from streaming services such as Spotify (which she does not feel fairly compensates artists for their work)—announced a few days later that she would be letting 1989 stream on Apple Music. Swift told me that, even after Apple’s policy reversal, she was waiting for the indie labels Merlin and Beggars Group to commit to Apple Music before following suit. (As an independent artist herself—Swift owns her own masters and has control of her distribution—she said she wanted to show solidarity with the greater indie community.)
“I wrote the letter at around four A.M.,” she tells me. “The contracts had just gone out to my friends, and one of them sent me a screenshot of one of them. I read the term ‘zero percent compensation to rights holders.’ Sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and I’ll write a song and I can’t sleep until I finish it, and it was like that with the letter.” I ask if she showed it to anyone before posting it. “I read it to my mom,” she says. “She’s always going to be the one. I just said, ‘I’m really scared of this letter, but I had to write it. I might not post it, but I had to say it.’ ”
Swift says she did not expect Apple to change its thinking; in fact, she was terrified “people would say, ‘Why won’t she shut up about this?,’ ” after the Wall Street Journal op-ed she wrote in July of last year about her concerns regarding free streaming services, such as Spotify. “My fears were that I would be looked at as someone who just whines and rants about this thing that no one else is really ranting about,” she tells me.
After Swift pulled all of her music from Spotify in November of 2014, the platform published a blog post about her decision, which read in part: “We hope [Swift] will change her mind and join us in building a new music economy that works for everyone.” The entry ended with a postscript referencing her songs (“Taylor, we were both young when we first saw you … ”). Swift says she was elated to find Apple receptive to her plea, in contrast to how Spotify had responded to her. “Apple treated me like I was a voice of a creative community that they actually cared about,” she says. “And I found it really ironic that the multi-billion-dollar company reacted to criticism with humility, and the start-up with no cash flow reacted to criticism like a corporate machine.”
Has Spotify gotten in touch with or talked to you since you posted your letter?, I ask. “They talk about me a lot,” she says, with a grin reminiscent of one she might flash in a music video while strutting out of an explosion.
While Apple’s willingness to engage with Swift on a one-on-one level is in and of itself indicative of her great influence, that the famously secretive and tight-lipped company was willing to chat with me about Swift certainly confirmed it. (One imagines Swift could successfully broker peace treaties between warring nations at this point, if she wanted.)
Photograph by Mario Testino; Styled by Jessica Diehl.
Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software and services, said that Apple had already been discussing paying artists for the trial period, after initial criticism from indie labels, but that Swift’s letter “accelerated [their] thinking.” He told me in a phone interview, “I spent time talking to [Apple C.E.O.] Tim [Cook] about it and giving him my thoughts and, relatively quickly, came to a conclusion of what we thought was the best way to do it.” Cue said that he “didn’t have a problem” with Swift’s calling Apple out (“I appreciated the way she wrote it”), and he said it was important to Apple to treat Swift like a partner in the matter, which is why he made sure to speak to her on the phone before they made any announcements. “When you’re Taylor Swift and you put yourself out there like she did, I thought it was appropriate for us to have a discussion together about it,” he said.
Swift calls Apple’s decision a “huge step forward” for the industry. At the Stella McCartney dinner party mentioned earlier, every woman present individually thanked Swift for writing the missive, she says, either on their own behalf or on behalf of a friend. “I’ve never experienced anything like this before, where everyone in every social situation I’ve been in has heard about this thing that happened.”
But just when I am starting to think of Swift as near invincible, that trademark self-doubt of hers returns. She slumps in her chair a bit, playing with her white shirtsleeves, and reflects, “I hope it doesn’t turn into something weird, where people have to poke holes in me, which is what’s happened every other time anything good has happened to me. You can’t believe too much of your positive hype, and you can’t believe too much of your negative press—you live somewhere in between.”
Friend in Deed
Today, Swift says, she feels “very understood” by the public, but she was not always so pleased with the way she was perceived. Around 2013, after public breakups with Harry Styles, Conor Kennedy (the son of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), and Jake Gyllenhaal, the narrative surrounding Swift was that she was an overly obsessive serial dater, that she only dated guys so she could later write songs about them. Swift decided, eventually, to just stop paying attention to the media. “For the better part of 2012 and 2013, I did not go online, because I didn’t like what they were saying about me,” she says. “And it was so overwhelmingly inaccurate that I knew there was nothing I could do to fight. When the media decides that they don’t like you, there’s nothing you can do that doesn’t seem desperate and irritating to everyone when you try to defend yourself. So I just had to go into my little emotional bunker and pretend there weren’t bombs going off outside.”
So, how did she crawl out of the bomb shelter? “I think that I just decided if [the media] was going to say that about me, that I was boy-crazy and so dependent on men and all that, I wasn’t going to give them a reason to say that anymore, and I wasn’t going to be seen around any men for years—so that’s what I did,” she says. “And what ended up happening was I became happier than I had ever been before. I swore I would never ever get in another relationship if it meant changing who I was, or taking me out of that mode where my friends are everything to me.”
Gomez, 23, who has been best friends with Swift since she was 15, says that she has seen Swift emerge from the tabloid flames, again and again, like a pop-star phoenix. “No matter what sort of tabloid-y thing people are going to try to pin on her, her position, her power, her career, outshines that,” Gomez says. “It’s almost like: Don’t mess with Taylor. Don’t mess with Taylor.”
While Swift maintains a “never have, never will” policy when it comes to discussing her dating life, she has been involved with Harris, a D.J. who according to Forbes earned an estimated $66 million last year, since March, when they were seen holding hands at a Kenny Chesney concert in Nashville. (This summer, Harris and Swift have started showing up in each other’s Instagram feeds, the modern-day sign of “things getting serious.”) When I ask how Swift approached dating in light of making this intense commitment to her sisterhood, she explains that she was only going to date someone who wouldn’t infringe on the new life she had carved out for herself. “That was the way that I decided to go on with my life,” she says. “Not looking for anything, not necessarily being open to anything, and only being open to the idea that, if I found someone who would never try to change me, that would be the only person I could fall in love with. Because, you know, I was in love with my life.” (Note the telling past tense in that last sentence, Swifties!)
She basically lurches out of her seat when asked if it’s important to her that her boyfriend and her friends get along. “SO IMPORTANT. Oh, it’s so important.”
“In every friendship group, you’ve got one or two girls where you hear people say, ‘Oh, she’s so different around her boyfriend!’ ” Swift says. “I never wanted to be that girl. So that was a huge goal of mine: never ever become someone else for the sake of a relationship.”
I suggest that it can sometimes be hard to maintain one’s identity in a new relationship, and Swift laughs, wisely.
