Taylor Swift threw us for a loop earlier this year when she announced that she would release a brand-new album, The Tortured Poets Department. But now that Swift’s awards cycle for TTPD is complete, and she begins the next American leg of her Eras tour, the pop star is on the precipice of her next era: Reputation (Taylor’s Version).
Fans have speculated that Swift’s Reputation era was coming in hot after she wore a custom green sequined Gucci dress to the 2024 Golden Globes in January. For the unaware, Swift associates different colors with her various albums, and regularly uses fashion to drop the same kinds of “Easter eggs” that appear in her music. She uses the color green, snakes, and plaid as a visual shorthand for Reputation—her grittiest album to date.
Swift reclaimed snakes (and, by association, the color green) after she faced a deluge of online harassment in 2016 when Kim Kardashian implied that the singer was a snake on Twitter following drama regarding Kanye West’s song “Famous.” The snake emoji incident served as a catalyst for Reputation. “A couple of years ago, someone called me a snake on social media and it caught on. And then a lot of people called me a lot of names on social media. And I went through some really low times for a while because of it,” she said on her 2018 Reputation tour. “I went through some times when I didn’t know if I was gonna get to do this anymore. And I guess the snakes, I wanted to send a message to you guys that if someone uses name-calling to bully you on social media, and even if a lot of people jump on board with it, that doesn’t have to defeat you. It can strengthen you instead.”
As she re-records Reputation (Taylor’s Version), she’s nodding to her past with her fashion, from the snakeskin Vivienne Westwood boots she wore out to dinner with Gigi Hadid to the Roberto Cavalli monogram snake bag she carried on a recent date night with Travis Kelce. And as for the plaid? My colleague Irene Kim—one of Vogue’s preeminent Swifties—says that it’s Swift’s take on grunge. (Nobody is better for the job than Vivienne Westwood, the queen of punk, herself, whom Swift has worn multiple times over the lead-up to her next era.)
Here, we look back at all of the times Taylor Swift has referenced Reputation (Taylor’s Version), from her punky Dior dress at the VMAs to her Monday night football looks.