Here’s the story behind Taylor Swift’s witchy ‘Fortnight’ look | 7MOQTX3 | 2024-04-28 14:08:01

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Here's the story behind Taylor Swift's witchy 'Fortnight' look | 7MOQTX3 | 2024-04-28 14:08:01

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Here's the story behind Taylor Swift's witchy 'Fortnight' look

COURTESY OF ELENA VELEZ

Velez's work is deeply emotional and personal. She has an unapologetically fierce, no-bullshit approach to design. As Velez explains, "I just crave depth and complexity, and I think my work tends to freak people out because they aren't sure how far I'll take it."

Hers is a story similar to Swift's own journey in music, at least as far as that drive and deeply rooted sense of self-exploration are concerned. And of course, the controversy. The musician's trajectory has been filled with record-breaking wins, and in tandem, the constant criticism and high-profile feuds that gave birth to her angry 2017 album Reputation, and to TTPD tracks like "thanK you aIMee," about her viral war with Kim Kardashian.

Also, both Swift and Velez, in their own ways, are keen to speak about the complicated nuances of feminism.

"A lot of my inspiration revolves around complicated and paradoxical representations of womanhood."

The Velez-designed look Swift wore to sing about treason and love as torture in "Fortnight" was designed as an extension of Velez's "fascination with the iconic American antiheroine Scarlett O'Hara: her reconciliation with apocalypse and determination toward self preservation." Finding beauty in destruction and power in messy women like the Gone With the Wind protagonist is a recurring theme in Velez's collections; and reinventing herself and embracing her critics' image of her as a difficult woman is something Swift knows all too well.

"Taylor Swift x Elena Velez doesn't make much sense without a good story, which the art directors of 'Fortnight' really gave us," Velez says. "From the outside looking in, I really loved the [Frankenstein author] Mary Shelley aesthetic on her. It's the culmination of a lot of funny overlaps in the zeitgeist, namely our relationship to reason and romanticism."

In the video, Swift lies chained to a bed without a mattress in a stark white asylum, wearing a white dress. As she sings about the love that's driving her mad, she strides into a room where masked black Victorian-looking figures and singer Post Malone (who guests on the track) are seated at desks typing, and a typewriter is waiting for her as well. In Velez's nostalgic look with matching lace gloves, Swift begins to type, over and over: "I love you, it's ruining my life."

In the next scene, she and Malone are lying on a pile of papers that form a silhouette of her head in profile. Then they're on their feet, embracing and happy, Malone — now minus his trademark face tattoos — mugging for the camera, as the pages float up and swirl around them. "And for a fortnight, there we were forever / Run into you sometimes, ask about the weather / Now you're in my backyard, turned into good neighbours / Your wife waters flowers, I wanna kill her," Swift sings.

Here's the story behind Taylor Swift's witchy 'Fortnight' look

COURTESY OF ELENA VELEZ

"I think to some people, The Taylor Swift Brand

Here's the story behind Taylor Swift's witchy 'Fortnight' look

is something of a Frankensteinian machination, in that despite the artifice and calculations of a pop music inception, her music really does speak to a uniquely modern sort of female esotericism," Velez says.

The designer says she is decidedly "not a Swiftie," but her art, like the superstar's work, is all about embracing womanhood in its most raw forms — celebrating sexuality, rage, power, passionate love, delusion, and even absolute fucking insanity. "A lot of my inspiration revolves around complicated and paradoxical representations of womanhood: our proclivity toward wickedness, moral ambiguity, and application of eroticism," Velez says.

I ask Velez if this Swift moment means she's now crept her way into a fashion realm with more mass appeal. "Mine is a punk brand in a highly censorial cultural landscape, and I don't map cleanly enough onto a lot of establishment matrices, which makes the industry nervous," she reflects. "But at the end of the day, it's important for artists to know that they can hold tight to the things they believe in and still get a big win."

This article originally appeared on Harper's BAZAAR US.

Related: Who is Taylor Swift's The Tortured Poets Department about?

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The post Here's the story behind Taylor Swift's witchy 'Fortnight' look appeared first on Harper's Bazaar Australia.

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