How should a poet dress? Since announcing her forthcoming album, The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor Swift—who’s been known to underline her albums’ themes and aesthetics with her own fashion choices—has shown us what, to her, a “tortured poet” looks like. The aesthetic can take several forms: She announced the album at the Grammys in February while wearing a custom strapless Schiaparelli couture gown with a thigh-high slit, lengthy train, and sculptural bodice, pairing the dramatic monochrome gown with inky black opera gloves. On the forthcoming album’s cover, the musician is wearing much less in a black-and-white photo of her lying on a crumpled pillow in her bedclothes. The looks are part of Swift’s world-building ahead of the album’s release, priming us to expect introspective, moody tracks. Swift is no stranger to using canonical, capital-l literature as a reference point for her songwriting, even indirectly name-checking the Romantic poet William Wordsworth in her song “The Lakes,” and her style choices are no less an Easter egg than her song lyrics when it comes to understanding her music.
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