What follows is the harrowing ordeal of one man’s quest to make the perfect Era’s tour outfit. In the process I made what may actually be a novel discovery in the thoroughly investigated world of Taylor Swift. It all started on November 16, 2022…
Who’s Taylor Swift anyway?
The Taylor Swift Eras Tour tickets had gone on sale two days prior in what some might call a fiasco, and despite having T Swizzle as my #1 Spotify artist 9 of the last 10 years1 I was not a Verified Fan. Over many hours that Wednesday,2 I tried and failed to get tickets in Philly, Tampa, and Nashville. On the 253rd try I managed to secure tickets in Denver in exchange for 10% of my income over the next 5 years and the naming rights to my first child or startup, whichever comes first.3
All was well for the next 6 months until my brother went to the Philly Eras Tour and came back with reports not only of a 3.5 hour T Swift set, but also of everyone (else) at the concert in costume.
Not to be outdone by a bunch of middle schoolers, and at this point without a day job, I set my mind to making the best4 and most historically accurate Taylor Swift music video tribute costume. This task was made significantly harder by the fact that most of Taylor’s songs about men are not exactly flattering, and if I could help it didn’t want to go dressed like a villain.
Armed with a mountain of free time and exactly one stakeholder (read: wife) to please I set about my task. To start, I watched every single early T Swift music video where the guy is not an absolute jerk (Tim McGraw, Our Song, Begin Again, Love Story, etc.)5 and made a Google doc with screenshots of Taylor’s and the male deuteragonist’s outfits. I then presented this document to my wife, who immediately vetoed them all and picked a picture she saw on Instagram as our inspiration. You Belong With Me it is!
In this video, Taylor is the unassuming band-geek-girl-next-door who has fallen for the high school quarterback (who has also fallen for her but she doesn’t know it yet!). The video opens with Taylor and the Boy in their respective rooms and in their respective PJs writing notes to each other on their respective notepads and showing each other through their respective windows:
In addition to the iconic shirt, they are also wearing plaid pajama pants. After spending multiple hours scouring the internet and placing 4 orders with Amazon and Walmart, I secured passable replicas.6 Now, though, we come to the main problem in this costume design. Shirts have both a front and a back, and despite watching the music video a half dozen times, I could not get a clear view of what was on the back of the shirt. Time for some investimagatin'.
Don’t pretend it’s such a mystery
Clue #1: At 37 seconds in the music video, there is a shot from behind of Taylor dancing in front of the mirror and for a fraction of a second you can see the top half of what is written on the shirt7:
Clue #2: /u/MessThatYouWanted on Reddit pointed out that there is a behind the scenes video of YBWM, and also that the shirt is a shirt from her band mate and not one made specifically for the music video.8
Clue #3: aka Fake Clue #1: In the Look What You Made Me Do music video, one of the Old Taylors is from You Belong With Me. But the signatures aren’t right, the colors around the collar are wrong, and the writing is a little too neat. Even if we could glean some new information from this shirt we should ignore it.
Clue #4: The behind the scenes video for You Belong With Me is a gold mine of information. We learn that not only is the shirt from Taylor’s band mate, but that it was a shirt the band mate made at band camp. Very nice! In addition, around the 6:52 mark you get a quick view of the back of the shirt as Taylor is dancing. There is no super clear view so you have to piece together the words from a couple shots:
After this investigation, I am reasonably sure that the shirt says Coffey on the back, so that’s what I went with. Fairly anticlimactic as I have no idea what it means beyond potentially a name, but googling the alleged band mate plus that name didn’t yield any fruit. I am also reasonably sure that no one at the concert got the reference, but it’s art for art’s sake. C’est la vie.
This is why we can’t have nice things
With my rainbow of sharpies, full knowledge of the shirt’s design, and an afternoon, I set to work on the shirt. After an hour and a half,9 I had finished the text and collar and moved on to the sleeves. Vanity of vanities! I made the pointy things point the wrong way:
Thinking fast, I simply cut an inch off of both sleeves and started over on the triangles. #MVP #Prototype
Long live the magic we made
Et voila!
The outfits were a great success at the concert. We even had a few people take pictures of us because it was so cute that a big ole husband would dress up for his wife’s dream concert.10
It would have been 10 of 10, but one year I put my mother-in-law’s new Amazon Echo on my Spotify when setting it up and she must have had Johnny Cash on repeat the whole year. Thanks a lot, Debbie. ↩︎
Did this have anything to do with me getting laid off 6 months later? I guess we’ll never know. ↩︎
OK, that’s a tad bit of hyperbole, but even in the presale the tix cost more than my 1989 F150. ↩︎
Well, maybe not the best, but a damned good one at least. ↩︎
Old T Swizzle is/was way better than New T Swizzle. Fight me. ↩︎
This is getting ahead of the storyline, but at the concert I saw some doppelgängers wearing flannel pajama shorts. Less technically accurate but much more comfortable in direct Denver sun at 95°. ↩︎
To replicate this shot, slow the speed to 0.25x speed and, starting at 36 seconds, repeatedly press the space bar to progress a few frames at a time. ↩︎
This gives lie to the rumor that the shirt was signed by everyone in Taylor’s friend group, an accusation that the Look What You Made Me Do video fanned into flames. Even ChatGPT thought that’s what was on the shirt! ↩︎
Sharpies are terrible for writing on cheap white t-shirts. Next time I’d get fat felt tipped markers… ↩︎
As you are no doubt aware if you made it this far in the blog, that is almost the exact opposite of what happened here. ↩︎