Decoding Taylor Swift’s style: Vancouver author breaks down superstar’s fashion evolution through the eras

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Taylor Swift Style: Fashion Through the Eras

By Sarah Chapelle
$35 | St. Martin’s Griffin 

A fan of Taylor Swift since 2006, Sarah Chapelle started blogging about the singer’s style in 2011.

Then a student at Kwantlen Polytechnic University studying journalism, the Vancouver-based Chapelle felt the project provided the perfect way to combine her interests in writing and fashion with her appreciation for Swift.

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Fast-forward 13 years, and the local writer has become an authority on the singer’s fashion choices.

On her website and Instagram @taylorswiftstyled, Chapelle details the designers and prices the superstar singer is snapped wearing. She also digs deeper into the meaning of Swift’s every outfit choice.

“Going deeper and offering context and commentary that explores the intention behind every outfit,” Chapelle explains. “I just felt uniquely qualified to be an expert source on her style evolution as a journalist, and a recorder of her fashion history as a real, true fan.”

With more than 344,000 followers on Instagram alone, Chapelle has built a brand around documenting and dissecting the pop icon’s fashion and beauty looks.

“For Taylor, her fashion and her music work together in tandem to communicate a message,” says Chapelle, who works in marketing in addition to writing her Swift content. “As fans, we recognize that and call her this generation’s most prolific songwriter. We’re most familiar with her confessional and emotional songs about her life, but I’ve always felt that her style is the other half of that story. It’s the visual half that iconifies every era of her life that she puts into her music.”

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That visualization, Chapelle says, provides Swifties — the name for the American singer-songwriter’s legion of fans and followers — with “distinct style moments to refer back to” as memorable markers in her career; a career that only seems to keep growing.

“Taylor’s had a truly meteoric last few years between the success of her back-to-back COVID-19 albums, and then winning her fourth (Album of the Year) Grammy for Midnights, and then the record-breaking success of The Eras Tour,” Chapelle says. “It’s been kind of a very large snowball getting somehow even larger. So interest in her has really never been higher.”

This month, Chapelle put that meticulous documentation into print with her first book, Taylor Swift Style: Fashion Through the Eras. The hardcover release features more than 200 photographs of Swift dating back to her Nashville country days to her current pop-icon status.

“The fandom often talks about ‘Easter eggs’ and the deeper meanings of her work,” Chapelle says. “This book specifically dives into the stylish ‘Easter eggs’ and the deeper meanings of this incredibly savvy pop star — perhaps one of the most savvy pop stars of this modern age.”

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Chapelle, who has met Swift and shares the story about that meeting in her book, will be hosting an author event at the Book Warehouse (632 West Broadway) in Vancouver on Oct. 17 at 6 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. Several of the book tour dates have sold out, according to Chapelle.

It’s an impressive example of just how dedicated her readers are to the stream of Swift style content.

“It really means so much to have found a group, a niche within a niche I guess you could say, of people who feel the same way about wanting to thoughtfully analyze the fashion that she is presenting to the world as part of her global brand,” Chapelle says of the popularity.

So, what does the superstar’s fashion choices say about her today?

“Her style is still tapping into a lot of the signatures that she’s started to establish as part of (the album The Tortured Poets Department),” Chapelle says. “As we saw at the most recent MTV VMAs, she was wearing this bustier top on the red carpet by Dior with elbow-length gloves that kind of seemed to mirror the elbow-length gloves that she wore to the Grammys the day that she announced Tortured Poets.”

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In contrast, Swift’s style when with her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, goes in a “separate bucket” from her onstage and solo style.

“When she’s showing up to Chiefs games, she’s there as a supporter, as not the main character of the day — although she is Taylor Swift, so she’s the main character of everything,” Chapelle says. “So I kind of put the analysis of Chiefs game attire into a separate analysis bucket, separate from looking at her fashion through the lens of the visual world and the visual legacy that she’s creating and crafting as it relates to her work and her art.”

While Chapelle admits the pop star’s approach to fashion doesn’t always match with her own everyday style — she definitely taps into Swift’s eras when deciding what to wear to one of the singer-songwriter’s concerts (she’s been to 14 of them so far).

Chapelle has tickets to one of the Toronto dates in November and all three of the Vancouver Eras Tour stops, which take place Dec. 6 to 8 at B.C. Place.

“It feels like it is meant to be that she’s ending the tour in Vancouver,” Chapelle says.

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Sporting a DIY bejewelled bodysuit and a sequin-covered green dress to two Eras dates so far, the Swift style expert had a few words of advice for those preparing their outfits for the upcoming concerts.

“Trying to figure out what to wear to the Eras Tour in the summer is not that bad. A sparkly bodysuit, cute boots — it’s not that hard trying to find something Taylor-ish to wear,” Chapelle says. “But finding something appropriately Taylor to wear for a winter show in Canada is going to be a different challenge.”

Thankfully, having been to a few Eras Tour dates so far, Chapelle has some inspiration to share.

“During the now-combined Folklore-Evermore set, she wears this really beautiful, lush velvet cape for a song called Willow,” she says. “And I feel like a heavy velvet blanket basically tossed over your shoulders is a great way to be on-brand and stylish, and appropriate, and referential to the tour — but a little bit warmer than … a bodysuit.”

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