Not what it seems. Though Taylor Swift often assumes fans will read into her every move, she didn’t intend for them to think she was comparing herself to the late Princess Diana.
The singer, 31, appeared on Late Night With Seth Meyers in a little black dress by David Koma on Thursday, November 11. Swift’s look was quickly compared to Princess Diana’s iconic revenge dress from 1994, and fans interpreted it as a message about getting even with a man, whether it be ex-boyfriend Jake Gyllenhaal or Scooter Braun, the owner of her old catalogue.
“Oh my god, this is not — I just liked the dress,” Swift told Access on Friday, November 12, at the All Too Well short film premiere. “It was a black dress I liked.”
The “I Knew You Were Trouble” singer said she gasped when she realized people were trying to make a connection there.
Diana notably wore a daring black dress designed by Christina Stambolian to a dinner in June 1994. Though she and Prince Charles had been separated for two years at the time, the Princess of Wales wore the dress the day after the heir to the throne publicly announced that he had cheated on her.
While Swift’s David Koma dress wasn’t an Easter egg, the Grammy winner knows her fans can make clues out of anything.
“They are the best detectives in the world. I love watching their theories,” Swift explained on the red carpet. “Sometimes they find things I didn’t even plan. … 95 percent of the time, I’m planning it, but there’s sometimes when they’re like, ‘The math!’ And I’m like, ‘Oh my God, the math!'”
The Pennsylvania native opened up on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Thursday about the decision to leave rewards for fans who paid attention.
“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 I do, every aspect of my job, so I really wanted people to read the lyrics,” she recalled. “When I was a kid I used to leaf through CD booklets and read the teeny, tiny print and just obsess over it.”
It started out simple with random capitalized letters in the lyrics spelling out a little message to fans — but the dedicated cat mom quickly went overboard.
“It was really fun and it would tell them a story about the album, or a hint about what the song was about. That’s when it started,” she explained. “When it got out of control was when I started to realize that it wasn’t just me that had fun with this, that they had fun with it too. And I never should have learned that, because then I couldn’t stop, and all I started thinking of was, ‘How do I hint at things? How far is too far in advance? Can I hint at something three years in advance? Can I even plan things out that far? I think I’m going to try to do it!’”
Swifties are having loads of fun analyzing the Easter eggs in her All Too Well short film. The director, who filmed the short on 35mm film, packed tons of hints into the 14-minute piece.
