Taylor Swift is back in action with the Eras Tour in full swing, and the whole world seems to be in a TSwift lockdown. Since Taylor is back on the road and she’s stronger than ever, is there a better way to celebrate than by having some of her superfans dive deep into some of her most memorable moments?
Over the years, Taylor has made a name for herself as the queen of easter eggs — everything from her heart wrenching lyrics to her sartorial choices and even her manicure often includes hidden messages of all sorts that might escape the untrained, non-Swiftie eye. Back in 2019, Taylor herself told Entertainment Weekly: "I love to communicate through Easter eggs. I think the best messages are cryptic ones.”
"It's sort of a tradition that we started a very long time ago," Taylor said to late-night host Jimmy Fallon shortly after the release of All Too Well: The Short Film. “I think the first time that I started dropping sort of cryptic clues in my music was when I was 14 or 15, putting together my first album. I wanted to do something that incentivized fans to read the lyrics because my lyrics are what I'm most proud of out of everything that I do... When I was a kid, I used to read through CD booklets and just read the teeny, tiny print and obsess over it."
“Taylor is a master at knowing when fans are latching onto something that’s going to become a really big motif,” Teen Vogue’s senior entertainment editor and in-house Taylor Swift expert Claire Dodson shares, hinting at the many visual messages, secret pen names, and self-references encoded in her albums. "I've trained them to be that way," Taylor said of her fanbase around the time she announced Lover. "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."
Whether you are an avid Swifite looking to take a walk down memory lane or a newbie just dipping your toes in the world of Taylor Swift (or simply a normie who wants to understand what all the fuss is about), there’s always lots to unpack when it comes to Taylor.
Take a deep dive into Taylor's mind — and maybe learn of a new TSwift theory — by watching the first episode of Teen Vogue's Superfan Show: