Ah, the summer of 2014. Taylor Swift spent those months being photographed leaving her apartment, and/or the gym, looking adorable and carefree and VERY leggy in a parade of booties and huge heels and vintage-inspired shoes. I still think about this Oscar de la Renta dress. And this cute preppy sweater! This great argument for a skin-tone shoe! This shirt-dress looking so good with her Rag & Bone booties (or knockoffs, but she was in a Rag & Bone phase for sure). And THIS! Plus this argument for being cast in season two of A League of Their Own, when we manifest it being rescued by some other streaming service!
Anyway, she released 1989 in October but dropped the lead single “Shake It Off” in August, and then rolled up to the VMAs in the leggiest outfit of them all: this Mary Katrantzou leotard. Although, it might not strictly speaking BE a leotard? It might exist in a nether space between leotard and romper, or a onesie, or somesuch. The outfit at the time felt very much like Taylor shaking something off — not merely pants — and stomping into a new and slightly fiercer, sexier… well, era, for lack of a better word, and 1989 did later give us “Bad Blood” and “Blank Space” and fully transition her into pop from country (2012’s Red built the bridge). Do the boots go with it? No. Is it a great garment? No. I stand by my original assessment that the clothes look like the lining of a Da Vinci Code-themed handbag, and that the crotch manages to be both slightly flappy AND to be threatening a wedgie. But I love her hair. I love her booties. And she’s serving the whole dish with elan, in that way that I think a lot of wish we’d done when we were young enough to throw caution to the wind and just GO FOR IT. Gentle crotch sag be damned.
